Science, business and China
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Today we interview a scientist and business person, Professor Stephen Hsu. Welcome to The Bridge, enlightening conversations on world cultures, life, and everything in between. Hey everyone, this is Jason Smith, host of The Bridge podcast from sunny California. If you like the show, don't forget to subscribe. We love The Bridge. Oh yeah.

My name is Jason Smith. I'm from sunny California, now living in beautiful Beijing. Today's guest is a man of many talents. He is a writer, podcaster, professor at Michigan State University. He teaches theoretical physics, computational mathematics, science and engineering, and has a PhD from Berkeley.

He is a Harvard junior fellow and has taught courses at Yale and other universities. Despite his outstanding accomplishments in these fields, I've invited him mostly to talk about business, but we'll touch on science if we can. He's also an entrepreneur and has launched businesses encryption, safe web, genomic prediction, forensics analysis,

authram which solves crimes and locates missing persons from dna evidence and super focus dot ai where they make ai for enterprises without ai hallucinations welcome to the bridge to china professor shu happy to be here uh you know i think we should get started you just were in china right how long were you you were like here three weeks four weeks it was over three weeks it was quite a lengthy trip so could you tell us about where did you go what did you see what was your trip like well

As with the little intro that you gave, the trip itself was also complicated because I started out in Shanghai and Beijing and I gave academic talks at universities and also at the Chinese Academy of Science. And those talks were actually on physics, physics research. But then for my own entertainment, I traveled to Yunnan. So I was in Dali, Lijiang and Kunming.

And I was in Kunming specifically to visit the university campus where my father had attended college during World War II called Lian Da, which is where Beijing University, Tsinghua and Nankai during the war, because the Japanese were occupying northeast of the country, they moved those campuses for eight years. They were in Kunming.

And so I was visiting that location as well. And then I went back to Shanghai on my way home. That's amazing. I have been almost everywhere in China that I can think of. I've not been to Yunnan, so I'm really kind of jealous. That's really fascinating that they moved the – this is – I didn't know this. They moved the campus. That makes sense. You want to maintain academic continuity. Are the campuses being used for something else now? Yes. So during the war –

For eight years, that was in a way the intellectual center of China. Lots of famous scientists and intellectuals were there on that campus during those eight years. And one of the things they did was establish a separate school for training teachers for

within Lian Da. And that school for training teachers became Kunming, no, sorry, Yunnan Normal University. So to this day, Yunnan Normal University is still there. It's a major university. And next to it is Yunnan University. But

But there's a museum that preserves the old buildings, or at least some of the old buildings from the old Landau campus. And there's quite an extensive museum structure there. You know, I think I want to ask you about your impression. You obviously someone who comes to China periodically, I'm guessing. I've been coming to China since the early 90s when...

As an American, the only place you could go was the special economic zone, which became later Shenzhen. May I ask you, over the last 30 plus years, what has been your impression of how China has transformed itself? Where was it and where is it? When people ask me about this, I often tell them it's probably the greatest story of the last century or more, you know, to have 20 percent of the world's population be

go from being very poor, living in just exiting kind of collectivist communist system, you know, under Deng's opening. And then from there, in a period of 30 years, becoming one of the most technologically advanced economies in the world. And also, if you measure properly, say, using purchasing power parity, you

It's the largest economy actually by a significant margin in the world. So the story of that happening over 30 years is actually one of the greatest stories actually kind of in the history of mankind. Yeah, I have a tendency to agree with you. I don't think there's enough literature out there on this topic yet. And I'm hoping that more is produced. So let's come back around to where China is now. So you've done everything in science. I researched you a little bit because there's too much to research actually. I was really surprised.

It's like Sheldon plus a few other of the characters on the show. So you've studied black holes and you've also studied software and genetics. I had this idea that scientists specialize in one thing, but your path seems to have had many different directions. Can you explain how you went from maybe studying one thing to just kind of doing everything in science? Well...

First of all, I'd like to point out that you mentioned Sheldon. That television show is set at my alma mater, which is Caltech. And so I actually went to school where Sheldon and his friends actually go to school. I started out mainly in theoretical physics, but it's not that uncommon for people in theoretical physics to

to branch out and do other things. There's actually an episode where Sheldon gets depressed about physics, and then he visits the labs of his roommates. One of his roommates is an astrophysicist, and one's an engineer. And he just goes to hang out at their places because he wants a break from doing his main thing, which is theoretical physics. And then he ends up, in a way, a humorous way, more or less

concluding that he can do their jobs better than they can. And so his roommate, the astrophysicist, comes in and they're talking amongst the roommates. And so the other guy says, well, what was Sheldon doing? I think the astrophysicist is an Indian guy. And they ask him like, oh, what did Sheldon do in your lab all day? And he said, well, depressingly, Sheldon realized I could be replaced by a modestly complex piece of code that he wrote.

So, so, so anyway, um, the joke is that theoretical physicists are people who wander into sometimes into different disciplines. Um,

After I had already become a professor, I got interested in internet security and encryption technologies, and that led to a tech startup I did with my... He was my PhD student when I was a professor at Yale, and we ended up starting this company together. That became SafeWeb. Years later, I got interested in genomic data because...

Our technology for sequencing DNA became very, very advanced. And we experienced actually a factor of a million decrease. I've noticed that as someone who's not good at math, that so many topics are

cannot be really breached beyond just like kind of a layman explanation without math. If you don't know math, you can't really understand like cosmology or all of these topics. You can read fancy books that are written by people who do understand the math, and they can tell you like fantasies about it or like tales, fables about what it's like to understand it, but you can't actually understand it without the math, which is very impressive. You know,

I guess your parents did a very good job of teaching you math. I wish my parents had done that. So you're engaged in business ventures. Is it why? Why jump from science to business? Because, oh, well, this is lucrative or because this was an opportunity. Again, was it curiosity? So if you have an idea in science that can lead to an academic paper that you write or some investigation that you do on some supercomputer or something like that,

But sometimes you have an idea that actually has practical real world implications. For example, you

In the case of this genomic stuff that we did, after we learned that we could predict properties of the organism or, for example, disease risks in individual humans based on their DNA, we realized there are a lot of applications. So the natural thing that's happened, this wasn't true when I was growing up. So when I was growing up, scientists all just kind of went in the lab. And it was a very rare scientist that ended up working and starting a company or something.

but the whole Silicon Valley revolution happened. A whole class of people called venture capitalists, um, gradually appeared who, you know, their, their job is to invest in interesting new ideas that maybe involve science and technology. So, um, for younger people than me, um,

It's natural to get drawn into the idea of if you have, if you participate in making some scientific breakthrough, if there is some application of it that's, you know, something that people might buy, a product, et cetera, it's natural to start a company as the vehicle for getting that scientific discovery to market. Wow. But you did this again and again and again. Is this common? Do you know a lot of other scientists?

who have started an entire litany of companies. It's less common. I would say the subset of professors...

where being a serial entrepreneur is a little bit more common. I would point to two subfields. One is biotech. So in genomics, for example, there are professors that have started multiple companies having to do with genetics. Also in things related to AI and machine learning. I guess that makes sense. It's very popular right now. Everyone's trying to get in on AI. I just use ChatGBT and Grok, and that's pretty much the extent of my AI experience.

You're listening to The Bridge. You know, I noticed, and this is not where I wanted to go, but I'm just curious. Your website where you do genomic prediction, you help forensic cases and you find missing persons, maybe who have passed away, who have been missing in some cases for decades.

So I guess there are a lot of families that are very interested in resolving what happened to loved ones. Is that where the business sort of originated? So one of the companies I founded is called Othram, and it's based in an area called the Woodlands, which is a suburb sort of north of Houston where there are a lot of technology companies. And what the scientific insight related to Othram is the following. Even from a single cell or a few cells –

that come from the body of a person. It could be from hair or skin or saliva, whatever you want, just a few cells. You can now extract the DNA from those cells, amplify it, and then sequence it. And once you have that data, so it's all pure data, it's information, you have their list of amino acids that form their DNA, you can then

to match in databases and find a relative of that person. So you can tell, is this, if I compare two different gene sequences of two different people, you can ask like, are they close related or are they basically unrelated? And, oh, you can notice like, oh, this person is the brother of this person, or this person is the first cousin of this person. This could be used to solve crimes, to identify remains of people that had been missing for a long time.

And I think Arthur now has solved something like a thousand cases, mostly cold cases, but also some even some hot cases. So we solve some pretty prominent ongoing criminal investigations, you know, that have been in the media. So it's definitely going to change the whole face of how crime.

criminal forensics is that I kind of feel comforted by that, that there is a way for for science to really help with that kind of thing, because it is something that was concerning growing up in the 1980s. I was always watching some TV made movie about disappearing people.

Okay, so you're I am. Well, I actually wanted to ask you because you have jumped into doing business many times. I feel like as someone who watches Instagram, and I see all of these promotional videos or videos made by CEOs giving advice to young people about what

how to start a business. I feel like there are people who I know a lot of entrepreneurs and they are very eager to just get on the next thing. And they have many projects. And then there are people who are like, I want to start a business someday. And you talk to them five years later and they're like, I want to start a business someday. So how do you go from, I want to start a business to we're engaged in business now. What advice would you give to young people in America who want to become entrepreneurs? Well, um,

First of all, I would say that entrepreneurs tend to be drawn from a certain type of personality. And one of the things that is important if you're going to be an entrepreneur is to be decisive. So you have to make a decision. This is true in business in general.

You have to be able to make a decision and execute on that decision. And, you know, that that decision might have been a mistake. Right. So so so you have to be self-critical and say, oh, OK, we went in the wrong direction. Let's reverse. But you can't dwell on the decision too much. Otherwise, you'll paralyze yourself.

So, for example, my wife has lots of great qualities, but she's not nearly as decisive as I am. And if she makes a decision later, she might lose sleep or or like be very bothered by reconsidering whether that was the right decision. So that quality of decisiveness just varies from person to person.

Generally, to be a business leader or an entrepreneur, you really do want to have that property of decisiveness. It doesn't mean you're not self-critical. You need to evaluate the decision to decide whether, oh, maybe we went in the wrong direction. Let's reverse course. You definitely need that as well. But if you're the type of person that gets stuck-

making a decision or the cost, mental cost, bandwidth cost of making the decision and sticking with it is too high, then you're probably not going to be great as an entrepreneur. You also are a podcaster. So you're on my podcast, but you have your own podcast, manifold1.com. And you cover a wide array of topics from physics to philosophy to the Chinese political system. I just listened to your most recent podcast, which was a lot largely about your trip to China.

So what's your vision for your podcast? I only do the podcast really for fun. I don't have I don't I'm not investing as much time and energy into it as I would say some, you know, big venture backed startup where like investors have put millions of dollars behind the company. I like having conversations like the conversation we're having now.

having a podcast is in a way a good excuse for having

conversations with prominent people. So you probably know this yourself. There are a lot of people that ordinarily you wouldn't necessarily be able to make contact with. But if you have a podcast and you have a good record of episodes that you've produced, if you email that person and you say, hey, I'd really love to have you as a guest. I'm really interested in this book you wrote, or I'm really interested in this company that you founded, or this scientific discovery that you made. Could we just talk for an hour? Suddenly that becomes possible.

And if you're going to have that conversation, you might as well share it. I think with the rest of the world, that's a great thing about technology is so easy to share that content. Now, I, as a professor who was already kind of well-known in the scientific community, and then also for my entrepreneurial activities, I could already meet with a lot of people and have those conversations, but I just felt it's more fun

if I can record it and release it, and then more people can benefit from the knowledge in that conversation. That is remarkable. You know, I wanted to ask you about your family's connection to China, because I follow your ex account, and your travel is in China. And I wanted to, you know, you mentioned your father, he attended university in Yunnan in during World War Two. Is that right? Yes. So my father grew up in Zhejiang. And

And during the war, the top universities in China, Tsinghua, Beida, and also Nankai University,

They were in regions that were occupied or bombed by the Japanese. So they had to move somewhere. They eventually migrated all the way to the southwest corner of the country to Kunming in Yunnan. And so when my father went to college, I think it was 1939, he had to he was admitted, but he had to travel all the way across the country under pretty primitive conditions to

to attend college. And it was really amazing for me, finally, after hearing lots of stories from him about those days, it was amazing for me to finally be able to travel to Kunming and take a look at the place where he went to college. Wow. So your father moved to the United States later? Yeah. So my dad is, it's very unusual because when people see my last name, which is spelled HSU,

Everyone assumes that I'm from Taiwan because nowadays, if you're a Chinese person and you spell your name HSU, you're probably from Taiwan. Otherwise, you would spell it XU, which is how it's done on the mainland now.

But my dad left China in 1948 before the communists won the civil war. And so when he left China, the way that Chinese names were translated into English was this old system that they've kept in Taiwan. So that's why my last name is HSU. But my father's never been to Taiwan. So do you have family, cousins and things that are still in the mainland? Yeah.

I have cousins both in Taiwan from my mom's side of the family and then also in and around Zhejiang, Shanghai, places like that from my father's side of the family. I'm always curious. I don't actually go see my cousins very often. But when you come to China, do you do you go to see distant relatives?

I have done it. I, I, I have, I'm a little embarrassed to admit that, admit on this trip, I didn't do it just because, uh, we had a pretty full itinerary and, um, you know, it just didn't work out, but I have like made a special effort to visit my dad's brother who's still alive and his, some of his kids who are my cousins. Um, so I have actually done that. Um,

Unfortunately, my Chinese is OK. It's good enough to help me get around China. But it isn't.

at a high enough level that I can have really in-depth, for example, technical conversations. And even with my cousins, like if we want to talk about more than just superficial things, I actually have to need a translator or have to like, kind of like speak in English to them. Do you like coffee? I love coffee. I'm drinking some espresso right now. And when I was in China, when I was in China, I was fascinated by the coffee culture there.

So I visited a lot of, I went to Luckin, probably, you know, this chain Luckin a lot. And there's another one that begins with an M. I forgot what it's, it's got very fancy. Man coffee. M-A-N? Yes. Yes. So I definitely checked out. And also like in Yunnan where they grow coffee.

I checked out lots of local cafes and stuff like that. So yes, I'm a coffee fan. Yeah, Starbucks has actually started to have in China a Yunnan coffee brand because you can buy from Sumatra and all these different kinds. You can get it from Yunnan. But my wife actually orders it on Jingdong on JD and we just order it directly from Yunnan how we want it. We contact the roaster. We say we want it roasted exactly like this.

And it just ships to our home from Yunnan. It's incredibly cheap, much cheaper than just buying it at the store. So it's really nice to be in a country where they're growing coffee. So I wanted to ask you about Luckin specifically because you did a post on Luckin. So what do you think about Luckin coming to the U.S.? Do you think that's something we're going to see? It's a good question. I don't see any reason why they couldn't.

come, you know, like obviously this is a, you know, one of these typically kind of complex business decisions that I'm sure they're going to analyze to death with lots of data before they make the decision. But it's not out of the question to me that for certain metropolitan markets, it might make sense for them to just try to open a few locations in those places. Now, if you ask like what's the...

What's the differentiator for Luckin versus the existing like Starbucks and other chains in the United States? So first of all, I was quite impressed with the – and this goes not just for Luckin but for basically many, many different companies in China. The aesthetic appeal of the product, like the logos, the decor at like a Luckin coffee shop –

or the others that are its competitors, it's at a very high level. It's at the same level as you would expect in a top brand in the United States. So I think they can compete at that level. I should say also like in California, bubble tea is a huge thing. So there's a super competitive bubble tea kind of market, especially in places like Los Angeles. So I think they have a chance. And then the other thing is that...

They really like in China, as you know, like a lot of consumption is through the app, is through your phone. Right. So people are just they order it and then they just go pick it up and they're not even taught. You don't even talk that the luck in person is kind of annoyed if you talk to them because it's more like just like, you know, you're supposed to interact through the app and then you just pick up your copy. I think like the U.S. is not quite at that stage yet, but it could be a novel differentiator.

If like Luckin opens stores here and you just realize how convenient it is to get your coffee that way. And it could probably be a little cheaper. I don't know. Maybe, maybe, I don't know if they can maintain those lower prices in the U S using the U S labor. I'm not so sure, but anyway, I think it's, I think it's quite, I think another differentiator that might actually keep the prices suppressed, maybe not at the degree they are in China versus Starbucks, but yeah,

They don't have a lot of sitting space. Usually in most Luckin stores, there are exceptions. There's like two seats or four seats. Where Starbucks, there's an entire range of places to sit and people are all sitting there pretending to write the next...

you know, great novel, but that's not the case. So one of the things they save on is real estate because they can have a really tiny shop and then it's just delivery people coming and going or people coming to pick up their drinks. So that's a way to kind of lower the cost potentially in the United States, just have cheaper real estate.

You have posted on the topic of soft power, meaning how China can influence the U.S. and create the conditions for mutual understanding for peace. You know, I think this is extremely important. This is the purpose, the vision for my show. How do we create peace between our two nations and other nations as well? So,

And, you know, what can people of the United States and China do? In a way, you're more Chinese than I am because you live there. I'm not Chinese. You know, I'm just a guest in China. That's how I think of myself. Because a lot of people say, well, what do you think about this policy of China's? I'm a guest here. You know, like, I'm not going to tell China what their policies should be. So that's my answer to that question every time. But what do you think we can do to increase understanding between China and the U.S.? Well,

Well, I think we're entering a very sensitive time because all the momentum on the U.S. side is sort of anti-China for decoupling, viewing China as a competitor, if not an enemy. So we have to fight against that.

My personal view is both countries can thrive at the same time. It's really a mutual trust kind of question. So the U.S. has been the top dog, the hegemon since the fall of the Soviet Union. It doesn't want to give up

that status. And it's openly, now the US government is openly trying to contain China. So for a while, they weren't willing to say publicly, they were trying to contain China, but now they are openly saying they want to contain China. So if the two countries could trust each other,

Then there's no reason they couldn't thrive at the same time. But if the U.S. is fearful of Chinese intentions and the Chinese are fearful of U.S. intentions, then you have this tragedy, great power tragedy of competition.

What happened in the handoff from British global hegemony to the US global hegemony is that because the two countries were linked so tightly, we speak the same language, we have same cultural traditions, the British could sort of hand off smoothly without fear that the US was going to try to dominate them or destroy them one way or another.

once it surpassed them. But the US is really afraid that China will try to do that. I think the more contact between the two countries, the more people realize, well, okay, they have a different system there. It's some kind of weird hybrid system now that is like descended from a communist system, but it has a, in a sense, more fiercely free market competition than even in the US in some sense. So I think if Americans just understood better what is going on in China and that they don't necessarily have to be afraid of

of increasing Chinese capabilities, that maybe China doesn't pose an existential risk to the United States. I think if we can get to that point, then there's a much better chance of mutual benefit as opposed to mutual, you know,

negative-sum competition. I noticed you post a picture of yourself in Beijing with a very well-known genomic scientist from the United States who has now set up shop in Beijing. And I have looked at the statistics, and there are an increasing number of U.S. scientists of Chinese descent who are now returning to China. Do you think that the United States is, in a way, shooting itself in the foot by creating a hostile environment towards

Chinese scientists and cooperation with Chinese universities? I think it definitely is. I would say that for many Chinese scientists that I know, not necessarily me because I was born in the US and my Chinese is not really that good. But for people who

maybe did their undergraduate degree in China, came here for their PhD or came here as a postdoc. For a lot of those people, there's a looming decision about whether they want to continue their career in the United States or whether they want to return to China. And I think the U.S. is definitely hurting itself by more or less establishing a kind of quasi-hostile environment to those people.

And from the hawkish anti-China perspective, what people would say is, oh, these guys are stealing all our IP. They're stealing our knowledge. We don't want them. We don't want so many PhD students coming from China.

There is a kernel of truth in that. So, of course, there is some IP theft. There is some, you know, danger of that happening. But I think that's swamped actually by the very, very high capability human capital that the U.S. has been getting from China for the last, you know, 30, 40 years. I think it's net negative for the U.S. to be so paranoid about Chinese scientists coming here.

You're listening to The Bridge.

I have you specifically on the show. I have so many extra questions that I didn't really think about. You know, we oftentimes there's a raging debate online about who is the most advanced, who's patenting the most technologies. So, you know, you do physics, you do theoretical physics. And China, as I understand, is at the cutting edge of, I think it's called fusion technology, renewable energy that produces no energy.

waste and could potentially power huge cities for infinite periods of time with little input. How would you rate the United States, China and Europe in this field in terms of fusion technology? Who's really in the lead or is this an international effort? You don't have to give away any trade secrets, obviously. So I don't work in fusion specifically. I would say actually

You might have a slightly wrong impression about how imminent fusion power is. I think that the most dominant green energies that we're going to see implemented at scale, I mean, at scales that really affect people in the next 20 years are things like wind and solar and old-fashioned nuclear. So old-fashioned nuclear energy

was never as dangerous as people thought, as people felt it was. So it was really a largely kind of emotional reaction and psychologically linking nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. And so two countries, France and Japan,

generate a really significant fraction of all their electricity from nuclear. And they have a pretty good safety record. So the number of people that have died or had cancer because of some side effect of their nuclear industry is really quite small. It's actually a very... But you can now do a look back. You can say, oh, let's look back at 50 years of nuclear energy in those countries. It's really very safe. And so the human civilizations or most countries have basically like

left some very low hanging fruit in not adopting more widely nuclear energy. Interestingly, the new Trump administration, because there are a lot of Silicon Valley people involved, are really going to push. They're going to relax a lot of the regulations and sort of needless red tape around building nuclear power plants in the United States. So I think

Those are the three sources of energy I think that are really going to impact people in the near term, in the next 10 or 20 years. Now, interestingly, in all three of those, solar, wind, and old-fashioned nuclear, not fusion, China is actually the leading country in all three of those.

So this is kind of maybe shocking to people. So for solar and wind, I think it's well acknowledged. It's pretty well known. China's deployed far more wind and solar energy than in a way like almost like the rest of the world combined. But if you look at what are called fourth generation or fifth generation nuclear reactors, China is also in the lead there. And that's not as well appreciated. But so I think actually most of the decrease in –

greenhouse gases that's coming in the future to sort of save our climate. Most of that saving of the climate is going to be done by China. Hey, everyone, this is Jason Smith, host of The Bridge podcast from sunny California. If you like the show, don't forget to subscribe. We love The Bridge. You're listening to The Bridge.

In terms of a range of kinds of technologies, it seems to me that China is at least at par with the United States in a lot of fields. So while the fear of cooperating with Chinese scientists who are working in American universities is that there might be IP theft, to me, it seems like there

There's mutual benefit because the people from both nations are very top of their field. Obviously, it is well known that the United States has the best university system in the world. But

But if you look at nature.com, Nature Magazine, in STEM specifically, China is now dominating the top 10. So for me, looking on as a non-scientist, it seems like cooperation is the best way forward between our two nations. What's your opinion? Yeah, as I said before, not cooperating is really a consequence of this sort of tragedy of great power competition, where you're just suspicious of

the other side and therefore you end up in a negative sum game instead of a positive sum cooperative game. And that's exactly what we're facing. In almost all areas of science and technology, China has either nearly caught up, like the gap is very small, or in a few China could even be a little bit ahead.

And so there's every reason for the two countries to cooperate to solve really important problems for humanity, whether it's new drug development, new energy sources, AI, things like this. They're all areas where there could be beneficial competition. The problem is, again, down to trust. And, you know, the point you made that being afraid of

IP theft in an era where you're now at parity or even the Chinese could be ahead is kind of strange. And that fear of IP theft is really looking backwards. It's for people. People are really basing their point of view, their perspective on what happened in the last few decades when there really was a lot of IP flow from the US to China because China was catching up

Lots of students from China came here and learned a lot of stuff, took it home. And there was actually, I'm sure, some instances of real direct theft of intellectual property, blueprints, things like that. So I'm sure that happened, but it's less and less relevant now because the current situation is pretty much parity between two countries in scientific and technical terms.

And so like IP theft is just going to be less and less important. It's more actually the ability, the internal ability of Chinese scientists and technology, technologists to do stuff on their own. And that's increasingly formidable. Actually, I would predict that China is actually going to

the balance will tip in the next 20 years. And during that 20 years, China will actually be ahead of the U.S. in many areas. You know, I sometimes feel like I no longer understand the American perspective on China because I've been living here for nearly 13 years now, and I rarely go back for more than a week or so. So when I imagine the American perspective on China, I think it's probably outdated because

So, when I left in 2010, 11, 12 to come live in China, at that time, there was a perspective that China was just rural villages and even the big cities with people on bicycles and stuff. Even at that time I came, that wasn't true. China was already this massive – with massive cities and development also, you could see that there were going to be entire new cities there.

that were going to be erected in no time, which are now just lights and LEDs at night. But what is the perspective and your understanding of how Americans see China in their day-to-day discourses, especially those who have never been?

And then what do you think that the disconnect is? What would you like them to know about what China is actually like? You know, it's a very complex situation because, as we were discussing earlier, China has advanced so quickly. Over just 10, 15 years, there have been dramatic changes. So since the time you first came to China...

As you and I both know, there have been tremendous advances in the quality of life, the comfort level in the cities, the level of affluence that people have, et cetera, et cetera, the build out of the high speed rail and airports and things like this. So most Americans, you know,

any two Americans, you could have somebody who's kind of more looking backwards and saying, oh, these are kind of backwards communist people, right, who ride bicycles everywhere. And then on the other hand, you could have somebody who's saying, wow, these guys are a real threat to us because their economy is now bigger than our economy and their military is catching up really fast and they keep they keep turning out missiles and planes. So you could have both

opinions from, you know, two people who are neighbors who live right next door to each other in the United States. If one is just slightly looking backwards and the other one is slightly looking forwards, the divergence is really huge between what they might think about China.

China. I was just going to say that the media here has shifted during the 2010s, which is when, you know, when you left the U.S., there were lots of stories about like a business opportunities in China. What a what a what a weird place. It's this huge population, but they're just kind of coming out of communism and adopting the free market system. And there are a lot of business opportunities. American companies are going there. We're going to sell them, you know, shampoo and and stuff like that.

That has now shifted to, oh, this is the scary country that's a competitor to us. And we really have to take steps to protect ourselves against them. That's really been the shift during the time that you've been away.

So it's very unfortunate, but I sort of would have predicted it because when China was way behind the US, it wasn't really directly threatening. It was a new market that could be exploited. As the gap closes, I anticipated America would start to become alarmed at, wow, somebody's catching up with us. This big country is catching up with us. And in a way, Americans...

You know, they've just become accustomed to being the global hegemon, and it's very tough to give that up. Do you think the trade war itself is frightening? Because, you know, in the past, and I've looked at the data and it is, I'm just asking, you know, there used to be a lot more...

interest in studying in U.S. universities, but obviously because of the rise in anti-Asian hate crime and so forth, do you think the trade war is frightening talent away from the U.S.? Well, specifically from China, it is. So there are multiple effects going on. So number one, 10, 20 years ago, if I visited a Chinese university and I talked to the physicists there or some technologists or engineers,

you could tell that they were behind the US. So if you were a really ambitious, outstanding kid in China,

you would say, oh, I want to go to MIT for my PhD because there's no university in China that's on par with MIT, right? That's changed a lot, right? So now, you know, a lot of kids are much happier just staying in China, going to Tsinghua or going to Zhejiang or, you know, one of the top universities in China. And the pull, the gravitational pull of the West is just much weaker, right?

on top talent in China. It's still there because it's still a lot of the best, very best universities and very best professors are say in the US for example. So that poll has weakened a lot. Secondly, the US is deliberately trying to cut off the flow of Chinese students to America. So they're making it harder and harder to get the visa, discouraging US universities from admitting lots of Chinese students.

So there are multiple factors which are reducing the flow of talent from China to the US. And there's even, as we were discussing earlier, there's even reverse flow. So I often talk to a mid-career

very distinguished scientist or engineer in the United States. And they're deciding whether they want to stay here and whether they want to go back. And for a lot of them, a typical situation would be they've done well in America, but they're always going to be slightly an alien in America. They're always going to have, they're always going to speak English with an accent. Um,

The Chinese government or the Chinese side is saying, "Hey, we recognize how well you've succeeded. You're a full professor at UCLA now. We can give you this big lab facility and we'll give you an apartment in Shanghai. You can come back to Shanghai Jiao Tong University. We'll give you funding to build this big laboratory and we'll give you an apartment right across the street from campus."

And it's very alluring. And plus, you have Luckin Coffee and Meituan Delivery. And, you know, you have all these other conveniences in China that you don't have in the U.S. And oftentimes the one factor that's limiting them from going back. And I know I know dozens, personally, dozens of cases like this.

is their kids. So they have some young kids, my kids in junior high, I can't move them back to China, they don't want to go to China, they're American born like me, you know. And so a lot of these professors and scientists are just kind of waiting for their kid to go off to college and then they're going to go back.

So it's a very common situation for these families. And it's not good for the U.S. I was going to ask, what do you, because you kind of already answered it by saying the U.S. doesn't seem to want Chinese students to attend American universities. But given that we've already established that the best way for to build understanding between these two nations is for more there to be more contact.

you know, more American students in China, more Chinese students in America. How can we encourage more Chinese STEM majors or any majors? It doesn't matter, history, philosophy, whatever, to attend American universities? Well, I think right now it's quite difficult. Let me give you, tell you a story which illustrates this. For a long time, there were these things called

Confucius institutes. So this was a form of soft power where the Chinese government would fund, they would go to an American university. They would go to UCLA and say, Hey, we want to set up a Confucius Institute here. And you know, if you're the Dean at UCLA, you might say, well, what's this Confucius Institute going to do? And the Chinese government says, well, we'll fund some people that will be language instructors. So we'll expand quite a bit, the Chinese language instruction. So students on your campus will have a better shot, um,

Better Opportunities to Learn Chinese. And then we'll encourage lots of seminars and interchange about things like Chinese history or U.S.-China relations or U.S.-China trade. You know, each of these Confucius Institutes at each of them at a different university specialize in a different sub area. Okay.

OK. And so there was a period, you know, I was a university administrator actually for a long time. So there was a period of time where universities were really happy to get Confucius Institutes because they could say to parents that wanted to enroll their kids at UCLA or University of Kansas. Oh, your kid, while he's studying mechanical engineering or while she's studying fine arts, she can learn Chinese and her business opportunities increase.

career opportunities in the future will be enhanced. That was the attitude here just 10 or 15 years ago, as you remember. So 10 or 15 years ago, lots of parents were thinking, wow, China's growing. If my kid speaks some Chinese, their career prospects will be much, much better. They'll have a lot of optionality that they wouldn't otherwise have. They could work for a US company in China, or they could work maybe for a Chinese company. People were thinking that way 10 or 15 years ago. But in

But in the last five years, what's happened is the federal government has become so anti-China

that they put a lot of pressure on universities to just kill their Confucius Institutes. So most, many of these, or most probably by now, these Confucius Institutes have shut down or are going to shut down. So that's like an example of like things going in like exactly the opposite direction. And usually it's not always a Republican, but often it's a Republican anti-China kind of hawkish type politician.

what they'll usually say about these Confucius Institutes. Like they might meet with the president of the university and complain, like, I can't believe you have this institute on your campus, which is representing a foreign power and they're brainwashing your kids. And, you know, they probably have spies. Lots of people who work at this Confucius Institute are probably spies, right? And

And so that's the perspective actually that we have to deal with. And consequently, these Confucius Institutes are all shutting down. I was just researching Confucius Institutes for a book, and I found in Italy there were like seven or eight of them. In many countries around the world, they still exist.

in huge numbers. And on those university websites, like you mentioned, there's a lot of bragging that goes on about all of the events that they have and so forth. It's a missed opportunity. Maybe we could have it where we set up Abraham Lincoln Institutes or something in exchange. I don't know. It's too bad. It's a missed opportunity. I wanted to ask you about China's economy and

you know, the business side of things, you're an entrepreneur, you have many companies. What would you say are the opportunities are for Americans who were interested in investing in China in some way, setting up a company in China, expanding, expanding an American company into China or setting up a factory in China to maybe sell in China or to move goods back home? I,

I think there are still lots of opportunities. However, for specifically for tech startups, which is that's the sector that I'm in, there are very strong barriers to, for example, taking money from a venture capital fund, which is based in China. It's more headache than it's worth now. Like most startups would just turn down.

uh, potential investment from Chinese venture capitalists in the U S so that there used to be a lot of flow back and forth and it's almost gone to zero now. And funds venture funds here are very worried about investing in companies in China. Whereas 10 years ago, there was a ton of investment from U S side in Chinese companies. So, so a lot of that really has bifurcated and it's, it's really a shame.

Now, there are lots of other things where like, you know, if I'm selling certain products on Amazon or in stores in the US and I want to get it manufactured in China, I think there's still tons of commerce going on, like people going to the Canton trade fair and sourcing products and sourcing manufacturing. That's all for real. I interviewed a guy called Molson Hart.

H-A-R-T on my show, which I don't know if you're aware of this guy, but he's pretty big on X. And he's been...

sourcing products and dealing with manufacturers in China for like, I think maybe 20 years, 15, 20 years. And he runs a company that distributes toys in the United States and stuff like this. So he's a great interview because he really understands how to do business in China and then how to bring those products to the US. Actually, in speaking of Amazon, they actually have the

shipping from China into Amazon now, built into the system for the first time starting this year. So it's actually easier than ever to do that.

I wanted to, you took a ride on HSR. Is this your first time riding the high-speed rail in China or you've done this before? I've ridden it many times and I've also ridden the Shinkansen in Japan. And I've also, I've also ridden the Teje Bay, which is the high-speed system in France. And they have the same system in Spain, basically. So I've ridden all of them, but,

on this trip, I got to do something for the first time, which is ride business class on HSR. I don't think I've done that. Oh, no. Just first class. No. So when you go, let's take an example. If you go Shanghai to Beijing,

which is what we did, that's very competitive with getting on a plane. Because depending on where you are in the city and how long it takes you to get out to the airport, and then how long it takes to get through security at the airport and all that stuff, it's about a two-hour flight from Shanghai to Beijing. It's a little over four hours on the high-speed rail. But when you add up getting in and out of the city and dealing with the airport stuff, it's kind of a wash. And the train is cheaper.

OK, now the train is, as you know, is super long. OK, there are over a thousand seats on a typical train ride on a typical route, a train ride from Shanghai to Beijing. There are over a thousand people on that train.

There's one little car at the front, just one car, which is the business class. And that's more expensive. It's like kind of 2x more expensive than first class. Okay. In China, it's reverse. Business class is more expensive than first class and then second class, et cetera. So...

I got to ride business class in China and it's got a, it's got a full reclined seat. Like you would have on an international airline flight in business class. So you just, you can go totally flat. And I slept, I think three out of four hours on that trip. And for me, that was worth it. That was like, cause I was jet lag and I get just the day before I'd given a talk in physics talk in Shanghai. And the very next day I was going to have to give

one at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. So I thought, oh, catching these three or four hours of sleep would be super valuable. So I think it's totally awesome. It's like the greatest experience ever to take a business class. I mean, it's not for everybody. It's more expensive. But for me, on that particular trip, it was definitely worth it. You know, I want to add to what you said, because you mentioned they're about the same in regular conditions.

In the winter, the trains are even better because a lot of times flights between Shanghai and Beijing and other cities are delayed because of snow and blizzards and things. So like if you take the train, you know, this is when it's leaving. This is when it arrives. There's no confusion about that whatsoever. So I really like it. I want to ask you, have you tried...

setting the coin on its side in the windowsill? Uh, I think for Americans who have to deal with like really crappy Amtrak, you know, trains, you just can't imagine how nice it is to get on one of these trains. And they're always on time. Uh, they're clean. It's so comfortable. It's so low stress. Uh,

If you need some food, you can buy some food. You can go to the dining car. It's just such a nice experience. And then I guess the other thing, which was a little bit new to me on this trip, was over time, China's becoming... Actually, I'd love to hear your comments on this. It's becoming more of a high-trust society, both because people are becoming more affluent, but also because there's a lot of surveillance. So it's very tough to get

away with a crime when there are cameras everywhere, right? So people claim, I didn't try this, but people told me this, that this is pretty standard, that if you're in Luckin or some cafe, people don't think about leaving their laptop or their phone on their table and they just go to the bathroom. And in the US, I would never do that. I would never think about that. Even in the safest, like, I don't know,

I don't know, Palo Alto, California or, you know, Ann Arbor, Michigan. I wouldn't I would never do that. But people told me it's safe to do that in China, although I didn't try it. What do you think about that? I actually think there are other factors, sociological factors. You know, firstly, I think, you know, there was crime 10 or 20 years ago, a little bit in a very slight, you know, street, mostly in China. It's not like robbing people in the street. It's more like tricks and scams.

So like you get scammed into going to a tea house, that stuff's all gone. I think part of it, it's not about cameras. I think that is definitely part of it. But I think another component of it is the increase in affluence over time has maintained an upward trajectory such that these petty crime is not really necessary in terms of everyone, wherever, whether they're still poor, because there's poverty in China. There's not extreme poverty that's been eliminated, but there is poverty.

there's poverty. There are people that are poor and there are people that are really rich with helicopters and billions of dollars. So you have the whole range, but the whole range has moved up. So everywhere everyone was is better than where they were five years ago and 10 years ago and 15 years ago. So I think that there's a sociologic, my, my own,

hypothesis guess is that there's a sociological deterrence because everyone feels like they're doing better than before. There's no real reason to try to steal anything because everyone feels like in five years, I'm going to be doing better than I was because there has been that

you know, movement in society for the last few decades. Let me let me give you another of my analysis tools for the level of crime and trust in a society. So my son goes to the University of Michigan. And when he was going through orientation, they warned us again that

And again, about bike theft in Ann Arbor. Now, Ann Arbor is actually a very affluent town. It's a college town with a big famous university. And there isn't really, as far as I know, any bad neighborhoods anywhere in Ann Arbor. But they were totally obsessed with bike theft. And the kids used very heavy kryptonite.

kind of locks on their bikes and they have to secure like the seat and, you know, they worry that anyway, it's something you have to be concerned about. And it's common for people to have their bikes stolen. In fact, what they say at orientation is at some point your bike will be stolen. That's what they tell you at the University of Michigan in orientation.

Now, I was recently in Amsterdam and the Netherlands, and I was looking carefully at the locks because there's a big bike culture. Netherlands is flat and they ride their bikes everywhere. It's really awesome. They've reengineered all their cities. So you can just get around with bicycles plus public transportation. So it's awesome.

they use very flimsy bike locks. It's like a little built-in lock that just like goes through the spokes of the rear wheel and it was locked. The rear wheel just won't turn, but I could pick up the bike and just carry it around. Okay. Okay. But that's enough. That's what most people do. They just, they just immobilize the rear wheel and

And then they go in and do their stuff at the store and they leave the bike there. Maybe they leave it all day. So there's, you know, the gap between Netherlands and University of Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is an apt and college town in the Midwest, it's huge. And then I noticed in China, the bike locks, they're also like super flimsy. They're just as flimsy.

as what they use in the Netherlands. So that suggests to me also like petty crime is like much less of a problem there than say in the United States. - I think there's also personal safety issue. Like I was looking at the statistics last night here in Beijing, which I guess is in the morning for you.

But it was 6.38 homicides per 100,000 people in the United States annually. And it's 0.5 homicides for every 100,000 people in China. So that is not just reflected in homicides, but personal safety everywhere. I often talk to women, especially from other countries, from the West specifically, and they feel safer in China than...

ever in any city in the United States. They could walk around at night alone and feel completely safe in China. There's just old people dancing, the damas and whatnot, or there's just kids walking around completely alone without a guardian in China often. There's no sense that anyone is sizing you up, which is a feeling that you sometimes get in an American city like

oh, am I, you know, am I safe here, like to be alone? Or should I go over to this area? It's, it's, it's very remarkable. And this is one of the purposes of the show. Also, there's a lot in one of the things I do try to do on X that I don't think a lot of Americans appreciate, they really think, oh, I'm being critical of the United States. But the reality is, there's a lot we Americans can learn from East Asian society from China, specifically, about like,

Maybe we should try some of the things that they're trying at home. Maybe they would be beneficial for us. Maybe not everything, certainly, but there are certain things that they may be doing in China that we at home in the United States could try to improve our own society. And I think, like you said, the flying blind thing is an apt metaphor because Americans aren't even aware of what's happening in China, largely. So it's kind of another missed opportunity. That is all the time, unfortunately, we have. I really enjoyed talking with you.

Hopefully we can get you on next year if you have time. Sure. I'd love to come back. Really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much. It's been my pleasure.