#30 - Dan Wang

Balaji (0:00)

Dan, welcome to The Network State Podcast. And I think, you know, we hung out several years ago in the before COVID times, I think, at some Stripe thing, if I recall, that Collison organized something like that. One of these-

Dan Wang (0:14)

Frontier Camp, we played a very, my favorite board game together.

Balaji (0:20)

Yeah, what was it? It was one of these things, was it Werewolf? No, what was it?

Dan Wang (0:26)

It was something close. It's called Avalon, in which there are roughly seven of us around the table. Three people are evil, they know who each other are, and the four good people don't in general know who anyone else is. And the aim of the game is for the evil people to assert themselves as good, and for the good people to deduce who the evil people are. I've been playing this for many years now. I play it in different cities, and I'm glad to have been able to play it with you in the woods of Northern California.

Balaji (0:57)

That's right. And I think, as I remember, I was, because it was the first time I played it, and I was thinking, what if we wrote the state space matrix on a whiteboard, which is either the really smart thing to do, or really dumb thing to do, and like Gwern got annoyed at that or something, as I vaguely recall. Yes. This is like many years ago. Yes, that's right. But I still think there's something to that. I have to go back and play that, and I feel like you might be able to, maybe be bad to write it on the board, and it takes away the mystique of it, but there's something to that, the prosimilation. Anyway.

Dan Wang (1:30)

I remember you doing that, and I think I was evil, and I managed to deduce who the Merlin was, based on your calculations.

Balaji (1:39)

Yeah, there's something about, like there's an underlying data structure behind the thing, some kind of prosimilation, sort of like the Monty Hall problem in Stats, where you actually write out the decision tree, and then you can actually understand it better. At least I wanted to see what would happen. Anyway, maybe it took some of the fun out of it, but it was fun for me, at least, or maybe hopefully for you. Anyway, so we first traveled in some of the same circles, and I liked your book, which we'll get into in a second, so Breakneck, and we'll put it on screen. And I liked it because, so what's funny is, maybe this conversation will be a little different than some of the other ones you've had, because it says a lot of things that I think are, that Americans should understand, but they're super obvious to anybody who's paying attention to Asia. And in fact, I actually think you go easy on the US. I'm much more of a bear, perhaps, on the US than you are. Maybe you pull some bunches in that, or what have you. Because actually, I'm talking to you right now from Singapore.

And so let me see if I can, obviously, others have summarized the book, but essentially, China is an engineering state, America is a lawyerly state. China actually is on the right in many ways, because Xi is all about the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Even if he's kept the communist symbols, Mao went after the Four Olds and went after a filial piety, and so on and so forth, and Xi completely reversed that, where it's really a nationalist, conservative revival of 5,000 years of history, and so on and so forth. In many ways, when Doug Xiaoping took over in 1978, a rebranding changes the logo, but not the guts, and Doug Xiaoping did a reinterpretation where he kept the logo, but changed the guts completely. It was basically, in my view, a coup, which is funny because neither the Communist Party, nor Democrats, nor Republicans, admit the extreme discontinuity between Deng and Mao, because I'm not butchering the pronunciation, but Hua Guofeng and the Gang of Four were supposed to be the successors to Mao, and Deng managed to take over and shifted it towards the capitalist road, even after he'd been purged three times, and then suddenly been thrown through a window, and the famous black cat, white cat, doesn't matter if it catches mice, and the Zhou Gang contract where those villagers, at least that was the idea of it. Maybe that was just a legend, but there's villagers that had a contract to do capitalism and they weren't actually executed unlike everybody else, and that was like held up a hand, Deng Shuiping held up a hand and said, okay, capitalism is legal in these regions, the special economic zones, and thus began Shenzhen and the things are all on the eastern seaboard, and that's how China modernized, didn't go to capitalism all at once. So I may be getting some of that wrong, but was that roughly accurate, kind of a quick capsule history? Go ahead.