Good morning,
Thank you to everyone who has reached out over the last week checking in on me. Yes, I’m still in quarantine, but I am in great shape physically — I had a bit of a runny nose for a couple of days and that was it.
Speaking of COVID, Shanghai is undergoing a massive lockdown; I reached out to Dan Wang, who I’ve talked to several times previously, to get a better understanding of what is happening on the ground. We also continued our ongoing debate about how far behind China is technologically, and how quickly they can catch up, as well as what lessons China is learning from the war in Ukraine, and the implications for Taiwan.
Wang is a China-based analyst for Gavekal Dragonomics, a global macro research firm based in Hong Kong and Beijing; he also writes for western publications including Bloomberg, Foreign Affairs, and The Atlantic, and for his personal site at DanWang.co.
On to the interview:
An Interview with Dan Wang
This interview is lightly edited for clarity.
All right, Dan. Last time we talked, you were the first three-time guest, now you’re the first four-time guest. It’s actually very interesting because we talked six or seven months ago and this was after the crackdown on all of China’s tech companies, and we were talking about is zero-COVID going to continue? And it feels like in all these areas there’s been pretty substantial shifts or new learnings and so I wanted to check in with you again. First off, where are you? Are you stuck in Shanghai? There’s all this news coming out of the lockdowns that are happening there. You were there last time I talked to you. Are you there now?
Dan Wang: Ben, first of all, I love being a trailblazer. So anytime I can join your podcast-
I think you said that last time!
DW: I blazed a new trail, I am always going to do it. You know, it is always also very, very weird if every time you have me on something really bad is going on in the world. So maybe for the good of the public, maybe it’s not so good that I’m such a frequent guest. Now I’ve left Shanghai, I left Shanghai about a week ago, where I’m currently in the tropical rainforest along the Mekong river by the border of Cambodia in Yunnan Province, where I’m trying to enjoy a little bit of a tropical holiday to pet the elephants and escape the Shanghai craziness.
So was this a pre-scheduled trip or you saw the lockdown coming and got out of dodge?
DW: I reacted quickly.
That’s good! I’m happy for you. What are you hearing, though, from people who are there? The views we have from the outside, whether that be news reports or what gets out under Western social media, it’s pretty scary. People struggling to get food, even water. Kids separated from their parents. What’s the view on the ground. Is it as bad as it seems from the outside?
DW: I think it might be quite a bit worse than what it seems than the outside. Now, Shanghai started to lock down about a month ago when it started posting a few cases, and at the time very few of us had been terribly concerned. What was surprising about this wave is that the bad news just kept piling on and on, such that we saw just a steady increase of new restrictions. At one point we woke up and figured out that all the schools had now been closed. Steadily the grocery delivery and eCommerce delivery platforms like Hema for groceries and JD.com for e-commerce had been slightly breaking down. So to have this series of steady escalation has been very surprising indeed.
Now for those of our listeners who don’t know, Shanghai has been doing very, very well in China, and has been known for having a light touch on COVID throughout the entire pandemic. Beijing, where I used to live, would lock down tight every single time, every other city would lock down for a few cases, Shanghai had a pretty light touch, it never really locked down. So we all feel that Shanghai is now guilty of quite a lot of hubris and is locking down in the most severe way; I think the really comparable event here is Wuhan in February 2020, or March 2020, when most people were confined to a space, and when Beijing deployed the People’s Liberation Army to really try to control the pandemic. So the situation is now pretty serious indeed.
I asked you this the last time you were on, but is zero-COVID sustainable? I know that was the message from Xi Jinping, so of course the Shanghai situation is going to be blamed on the local leaders, but is that messaging going to carry the day, that Shanghai should have done better? Or is there going to start to be some realization that this is impossible for the long run?
DW: We’re probably getting a little bit closer to the realization that zero-COVID is not possible, especially given the variant on top of Omicron which makes it far more transmissible. I think the way to think about this is that Beijing has deployed the People’s Liberation Army, again, for only the second time throughout this pandemic, and if you deploy the army to try to control this virus, well, then it becomes very slightly more complicated to say, “A lot of this is just local incompetence, the rules were not properly enforced,” because if the army is involved, then things are much more challenging to pass the buck.
It really is pretty surprising how poorly the Shanghai government has managed things. Shanghai is known throughout the rest of the country for being the most progressive, for having the greatest resources, for being the richest jurisdiction in the country, for doing a lot of the nicest things. I’ve written recently about how pleasant a city Shanghai really is. Every time we Shanghaiers would have to go to Beijing, we’re asking ourselves, “Why do we, who are living in mini New York, have to visit mini Pyongyang again?” So it’s been pretty shocking to see how poorly Shanghai’s government has bungled things.
In my view, the most stark issue here is that for a lot of people, Shanghai is out of food. So the grocery delivery platforms have been mostly shut down for the last few days, even over the last few weeks. It’s become quite a bit more difficult to buy groceries. Now that everyone is confined to home, the government is now sending rations of packs of vegetables to different people. Now, some of these rations are fairly generous. You have people getting some fish, you have people getting some shrimp and an assortment of things, but a lot of these ration packets are a head of cabbage, a few potatoes, carrots, and that is what you have to live on for the next while. This is the big surprise to all of us, that the government has looked fairly hesitant, uncertain, even incompetent in this case, and not correctly managing what should be a more straightforward affair with delivering food to most people.
I think you mentioned your annual letter in passing, referring to talking about Shanghai versus Beijing, and we’ll have a link to it, as it’s always an amazing read. But I think I would gauge that letter and our last interview as being pretty optimistic about China, I think particularly relative to maybe broader opinion. Over the last few months, though, you not only have this COVID situation coming back to the fore, but you also seem to have some backtracking around initiatives like reforming the real estate market or Common Prosperity. Are things looking a little bit stormier than they were even a few months ago?
DW: Things are absolutely more stormy over the last few months in China than even just three months ago when I published my letter. I think there are four big risks this year that’s going to make 2022 a very, very special year indeed. The first big risk, as you put it, is COVID. Right now the biggest economic city in the economic center in the country is under the most severe lockdown, demanding the army. That is a pretty big thing, and the danger here is that even if Shanghai is back to normal in something like two or three weeks, which I think is the most optimistic scenario, we don’t know if we have to do these rolling lockdowns throughout the rest of the country throughout the rest of the year. So that is the first big risk.
Second, if there are huge lockdowns of something like, let’s say, 10% of the country going dark for any given point, then the economy cannot do well. The National People’s Congress this year set a target of 5.5% GDP growth. It was ambitious in the best of times when there wasn’t quite a bit of COVID running around, but to have something like 5.5% growth while shutting down 10% in the country at any given point, that is looking far more difficult indeed.
The third big risk is this geopolitical uncertainty as it relates to Russia. It’s hard to figure out what exactly is going on here, but at least we can acknowledge that there are a lot of unknown unknowns.
And finally, the major event that will be the controlling force for this year is going to be the 20th party Congress held sometime in the fall, probably September or October of this year, when General Secretary Xi Jinping, is going to very likely almost certainly seek a third term as China’s top leader. And so, having this Party Congress in place, I think, is a very big reason that the country is pursuing zero-COVID, to make sure that COVID is not running rampant over what is the most important political event in China every five years, especially for Xi Jinping on a personal level; and then also, to set this fairly ambitious growth target so that people are feeling pretty good.
I think one of these things are going to have to give. Even in the other previous few party Congress years, we have a lot of politicians being purged for the sin of joining the wrong political faction, and when you add up all of these four factors together: COVID, the economy, geopolitics, as well as the Party Congress, this is going to be just a really weird brouhaha and I am not sure how things are going to shake out this year in China.
The level of uncertainty is really striking. You said that “almost certainly” Xi Jinping will be re-elected. Is there any thought or any discussion that that wouldn’t happen? From the outside, it’s certainly just been assumed that will be the case.
DW: The conventional wisdom in China is that Xi Jinping will have a third term, but what we don’t know is the shape of his responsibility. Now, there are a lot of tea leaf watchers in Beijing who are following these things much more closely than I am, but there is some speculation that he resurrects the title of Party Chairman, which previously only Mao Zedong held, and then appoints a new General Secretary, which would be his successor. Also, the other major uncertainty is the composition of the Politburo, and is there some sense that the Politburo will be stacked a little bit more evenly between different factions within the party? Or is he going to have a run of the table and have many of his own people in place at this most senior leadership positions?
We’ll get to some of the geopolitical stuff in a little bit; but we’ve had a good tug of war about China and its technological outlook over the course of these interviews. I do have to say, I feel like your most recent research note kind of came a bit over to my view of the situation more than before. To summarize, you made the argument that while China is very good at manufacturing skill and scale, it’s less good at fundamental scientific research and the industries that rely on that. Your examples were solar panels and batteries on one side, and semiconductors and jet engines on the other. Can you walk us through the argument that you made there, and is that a shift in your thinking, or a refinement? I’m curious if you feel you’ve changed at all on this point.
DW: Ben, I’m very, very keen to be conciliatory. So, if there is disagreement between us, I’m always optimistic that you and I can work things through and rationalize away our differences.
Don’t worry. I have a plan to be conciliatory, in a moment, so you just you’ll just have to wait! But continue.
DW: The premise of my research note is to really try to find a way to think about why China has been fairly good in certain areas, and why it is still pretty behind in some others; what we should generally resist doing is wave our hands, and say things like “cultural differences”, or just to refer to a simple complexity criteria on it. [It’s too basic to say,] “Look, China is able to do very well in things like high-speed rail or solar photovoltaic or large-scale batteries. But there are just some problems with China not being able to figure out something like chips or wide-body aircraft, especially the jet engine and avionic systems inside.”
I think, just as a starting point, that whatever technologies are much more manufacturing-heavy, rather than science-heavy, China has for the most part figured that out. But wherever there is a lot of difficulty with the fundamental science, well there China is fairly weak. And so, if you take a look at the examples, I’ll just name three; something like solar photovoltaic, something like large-scale batteries that go into electric vehicles, and something like consumer electronics components, like all the screens and acoustical parts and everything else. These are things where the manufacturing challenge is considerable, but it’s all execution risk. There isn’t a lot of science involved in trying to figure out a lot of these well-established processes. If you take a look at something like large-scale batteries, there is something like twelve discrete steps involved in putting together a battery, all of which are heavily capitalized, and all of these demand perfect execution between each step, from everything like cell filling to final sealing. China is pretty good at a lot of these things, where all the execution risk is highest along well-established processes, and that also describes a lot of the situation for consumer electronics.
Where China does face a lot of greater challenges are in things like chips, which require the integration of a lot of different areas of science. So here you need chemistry, electrical engineering, computer science, a whole lot of other things; as well as wide-body aircraft, where the jet engines require things like aerodynamics, material science, and a whole lot of math. So now wherever the challenge is mostly manufacturing, China is pretty good. It has the army of chemists to push forward different chemical mixes, but where it requires quite a lot of fundamental research in sciences, China is still pretty weak.
My contribution to this argument, in addition to the points you’ve made, is that China obviously benefited hugely from global trade, famously joined the WTO, and that helped really jumpstart everything. But this idea of comparative advantage, it worked against the country as well, in that China took all the labor-oriented industries, and the West ended up with all the capital-focused ones. And so you get to something like semiconductors, yes, fundamental scientific research is a big part of that, but there’s also the collective knowledge of a workforce that’s only built by working down the learning curve. The same thing applies to jet engines, and I feel like China never went through that. They’re kind of like a bodybuilder who only worked on their arms and never worked on their legs, and it was in part because of the West: China never had to build up these capital-intensive skills, because they could just buy it from the West, and that’s one of the reasons why they are may be further behind that than they thought. Is that fair? Do you feel they are further behind than you thought, then you might have thought a few months ago?
DW: Well, last time I joined the Interview Series, Ben, I believe I accused you of being a Marxist, and today, I’m very glad to be able to do it again. Thinking about things in capital and labor, come on! I’m thinking about things in terms of manufacturing and science. And so, I believe these are a little bit more robust of a framework to think about these different things.
But I absolutely do take your point, that the analogy of a bodybuilder is the right one, to spend all of their time working on the biceps instead of working on the core, that is core systems and core technologies like semiconductors, jet engines, and then other things like seed technology, which the Central Committee is also very much focused on. Maybe the best way to think about why China hasn’t had the ability yet to figure these things out, in the most charitable way, is that they haven’t had the great need to figure out a lot of these things yet. Here is where I agree with your point, that they were able to buy from overseas, that they really need to re-invent a lot of these toughest wheels. But today, they really have to re-invent a lot of these toughest wheels, because the West is looking much more like a geopolitical adversary that’s not willing to sell a lot of the technologies that China needs. China’s now the sort of body builder that realizes that it’s pretty insufficient to train only the biceps, now it needs to have a full body workout to be full stacked on both the sciences, as well as the manufacturing.
Just to put you on the spot, has your estimation of when China will catch up in these areas, has it shifted? Are you a little more pessimistic about their ability to catch up, and be truly independent from the West than you were maybe a few months ago?
DW: I don’t think so. I think all of the risks that I mentioned to you are all fairly short-term and contingent things. I don’t think that COVID has a very great impact on China’s long-term secular rise as a scientific power, in some ways, that accelerates it. The economy is weak, and that is an issue, geopolitics is fairly uncertain now. A lot of the fundamental trends that I’ve spoken about in our earlier conversations, I think still broadly hold in place. A lot of these facts I would cite are things like, at first, a lot of what China has to do is to reinvent existing technologies. We know how to make a DRAM chip, we know how to make a UV lithography machine, even though these things are pretty darn hard and these are some of the most complex technologies ever dreamt of. But making it the first time is much more challenging than trying to replicate it the fifth time, and you don’t need any new theories to reinvent any existing tools.
China, as I mentioned, has figured out a lot of other technologies in the past. If you take a look at Made in China 2025, which was announced in 2015, seven years ago, China listed a bunch of areas it wants to figure out, and actually it’s gotten pretty good progress on quite a few of them, and the others are not doing so well, like chips and aviation, but it’s also gotten pretty good progress, and I expect that secular trend also to continue.
So, when you add up the fact that China has a pretty strong state, as well as a lot of still, I think, great entrepreneurs, as well as a steadily capable technical workforce, and the fact that what they have to do is to reinvent technologies instead of engaging in invention de novo, I think there is still broad optimism in place that I certainly have, that China will be able to figure out a lot of the technological deficiencies that it lacks.
This is where I have to note that I have come closer to your position. I wrote a few weeks ago in Tech and War about the interdependence between the West and China, and how that might constrain China on one hand but also I think the big concern — and this has come up in the context of Russia, and we talked about this in the context of Huawei and things like that — push the country towards even more independence from the West on the other hand. And semiconductors being a critical question on how far this independence would go.
Just to put this in the context of Russia, it’s been a few weeks now, but it seems clear that China is staying firmly on Russia’s side, albeit without blatantly violating sanctions so far. Is that your view of the situation? What is China’s thinking here? we’ll get to how that impacts other stuff, but is that a fair view of how you see how China is approaching this situation?
DW: I think that’s a very fair view, and the best evidence to substantiate your point that China has mostly shifted to Russia’s position is that if you take a look at the news communication that China gives to its citizens, it is pretty close to the Russian line. Even if you look at a lot of the videos on social media, in general there is not much of a focus on the Ukrainian civilians who are currently being struck at by the Russian invading army.
At the same time, I think the Politburo has realized very well that it certainly cannot do anything too blatant in terms of violating sanctions. You can do things here and there with these smaller banks, which may not suffer too much, and it has that experience with Iran as well as North Korea, but I think your summary is pretty good, which is to support Russia, mostly diplomatically, as well as rhetorically, without being too obvious of a sanctions violator, which really angers both the Europeans as well as the Americans.
We discussed this in the context of semiconductors, where China always had the idea of being independent, but then when Huawei gets killed, they have the imperative to be independent. Is there going to be a similar takeaway from seeing the sanctions on Russia, for example, where, “Ok in the future, we might want to move against Taiwan or wherever it might be. We always had the sense to be independent, now there’s imperative to do so.” Is that a very strong sentiment?
DW: My sense is that China has been pursuing self-sufficiency hard for the last several years, pretty much since Donald Trump entered the White House, and that they have really been pushing hard in every area, in areas like technology and areas like finance and areas like food security. They are trying pretty hard to be more self-sufficient. Now, you and I both know, Ben, that nothing about China is very simple, it never is. But I believe that the strategy they have with respect to geopolitical adversaries like the US is in fact fairly simple, and that’s encapsulated by a Communist term called dual circulation. The essence of dual circulation, in my view, is to make the rest of the world as dependent on China as Beijing can make it, so that the rest of the world is a little bit more restrained against the most hawkish that it can be, and at the same time, it is to make sure that China is less dependent on the rest of the world in areas like technology, food, as well as in finance.
In my view, that is a fairly robust strategy, and it has the benefit of simplicity. Whereas the US has to go through these pretty agonizing questions on the sort of economic relationship it wants to have with China. Currently, about $200 billion of direct exports make it from the US to China, but that’s really dwarfed in sales by the US corporates in China. So if Apple makes an iPhone in China, or if Nike makes a shoe in China and sells it domestically, in this book, that’s a sale and that figure comes to around $600 billion, which is quite a bit more than direct exports. The Chinese strategy is fairly simple — make the rest of the world more dependent on China, while making China less dependent on the rest of the world.
Now, what I think what has really changed with Russia is that if Beijing had any doubts that the US and Europe and all the other like-minded nations would hesitate to sanction China, well, I think there is now a pretty straightforward playbook. The western-led order has sanctioned Russia six ways to Sunday, with everything involving technology and finance and everything that the West can get its hands on, and that is a very plausible playbook, if Beijing ever decides to initiate a conflagration over Taiwan. I think that concentrates minds in Beijing that they’ve been pushing very hard on self-sufficiency, and either they ought to delay this great project of the rejuvenation of the Chinese people, or think much harder about what they can live with in a world much less dependent on the US. So, I think the effort is still the same, there’s just now much less hesitancy about pursuing these aims.
Is there any retreat from this? I mean, we’ve talked in terms of semiconductors. If the US were to loosen some of its restrictions, or whether it be on Huawei or whatever it might be, could interdependence increase? Or is this really sort of a one way road where — I think the way I’ve always thought about globalization, it’s sort of like the economic weapon of mutually assured destruction, where if it goes sideways, it goes sideways for everyone, and the more that countries are independent the almost more freedom of movement they have, which actually increases instability. And you look at chips, if Intel actually pulls off their transformation, that actually arguably increases instability, because now TSMC is less of an essential company to everyone. Can this process be reversed, or are we marching towards a separation at this point, no matter what happens?
DW: My sense is that the road probably won’t change, it is, as you say, a one-way road, but the speed of going down the road might still be something that Washington DC is able to change. Previously I’ve come on the series to say that one of the things that the US government has done is really pushed a lot of the entrepreneurial firms in China to cultivate homegrown technologies. I wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs called China’s Sputnik Moment for this, because the US government has really concentrated its sanctions’ fire power on a lot of China’s most dynamic firms, firms like Huawei. And Huawei, as you said, it’s getting killed, it lost about 30% of revenues last year, due pretty much expressly to US government actions. Huawei, which is a notoriously difficult customer, is now all sweetness and light, asking for collaboration from smaller Chinese firms, saying, “Won’t you please collaborate with us?” Previously it had no time for these firms, it preferred to buy the very best technologies on the market, which were almost invariably American, or European, or Japanese. Now it really has to buy obviously inferior Chinese technologies, because that has a business case to build up a lot of these homegrown systems. That’s not just Huawei’s calculation, it is also what Tencent, and Bytedance, and SMIC, and DJI are all thinking about.
The point you make about whether interdependence decreases instability is still an intriguing one, and I’m not sure that we have a very good sense yet. There are some international relations scholars, people like Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman who came up with this very good term called “weaponized interdependence” to show how sanctions have been fairly effective. It’s for these greater minds than mine to figure out what exactly are these larger strategic implications, but what I can see a little bit more clearly on the ground is that a lot of Chinese firms, which really didn’t have time for domestic technologies yesterday, really do have to cultivate a lot of these things today. That is still something that Washington DC can change. If it is able to give them quite a lot of the technology that China needs, well, then it still has the ability to crush a lot of these massive startups, which are now entirely geared towards selling to these pretty capable firms in China, maybe also in Russia, which are not reliant on US technologies. The US should still be asking these hard questions like, “Should it want a lot of Chinese firms to be using its own technologies and its own products or should it want the Chinese firms to be using predominantly American technologies?”
One final question. How, if at all, has your view of the Taiwan risk changed? I have to ask you this because I was traveling over the last couple weeks, and as you can imagine, I got asked this constantly, so I will put it to you.
DW: Ben, I want to hear your answer first.
My answer is I think it has decreased the risk in the short-term, because I think that China is probably surprised by the unanimity and vigor of the Western response, and it’s probably a bit of a wake up call that the West still can get its crap together to a certain extent, but it’s probably increased the medium-term, in that China now knows what it has to do, what issues it has to overcome, what preparations it has to make. It, to your point, focuses minds on doing that. I do also think the clear trepidation in the West about Russia using nuclear weapons might also weigh into this, in that China may realize they have a bit of a trump card, which is, “Hey, if we do an embargo, and say we’re going to respond with nuclear, the West isn’t going to do anything.” That adds an additional layer of ambiguity into the question. Basically, short-term risk, I would say, is down a bit, but medium-to-long term risk is probably up a bit. I’m not sure what exactly the time periods are with that, but that’s my answer.
DW: Yeah, that’s exactly my view, that in the short-term at least, Beijing certainly knows that whatever lack of vigorous response it can hope for from the West, probably is now put to bed because of all of these different actions from the West. The major uncertainty that we have here, is that none of us can define a timeline. If we don’t know what the medium-term is, if we don’t know what the long-term is, then it becomes much more difficult to say when exactly these things will happen. My sense has always been that Beijing has never laid out a clear deadline of when it would really like to liberate Taiwan Island.
Just teasing you here, Ben.
(laughing) I’m well aware what the on-the-ground rhetoric is, so I’m not offended.
DW: My sense is that they don’t have a clear timeline, and so they’re probably in a wait-and-see mode. It’s probably going to happen within the next thirty years, in time for the centenary of the People’s Republic’s founding. Anytime within the next 30 years; your guess really is probably better than mine, since you’re on the ground there. I’m just in the border of Cambodia, enjoying some great food in southern Yunnan, and petting some elephants.
Well, that’s better than me. I’m stuck in government quarantine! I don’t know, there’s no point for China to not be ambiguous about this. There’s an aspect where having the Taiwan issue out there is probably useful in general domestically. There’s the point where the interdependence is real, and of course, any conflict around Taiwan would be devastating, not just for Taiwan, but for China, and for the West, given the degree of interdependence. The big question, in my mind, is that China may talk about being independent, but how much can they actually achieve? Would they allow capital outflows? Would they actually carry trade deficits to make a world Yuan-centric? I have a hard time seeing that. As long as that’s the case, I think the question is whether the US is actually a little more dominant than most people think, or appreciate? We’ll see, the last few months have been a real wake up call for lots of folks. The big question is, how long does this sustain? Is it going to be a flash in the pan, where in six months Germany’s opening the pipeline and buying Russian gas, and not actually building a military? Or, is this a fundamental shift? That’s probably an open question that China’s paying a lot of attention to, as well.
DW: Let me extend that point a little bit further. First of all, I agree with everything that you just said, especially the vigor of the Western response on sanctions on Russia. The only cloud I want to cast on the argument is, that sanctions are a destructive tool that are destructive both on the home economy, as well as on the targeted economy. In general, the countries do this because Western government has judged that the pain on the home population is much less than the pain on the targeted government or the targeted population. You must run down a lot of the West’s gains in terms of denying a lot of corporates the ability to make money from different markets. Seeing these economic destructive effects being put to use, may be good, but what is really essential for the West is not this short-term pain it can impose on adversarial countries, but really what it can do in the longer term to build up its stock of powder to continue using these sort of things.
What would be a very bad result for the West, over the long-run, would be if it really restrains its own firms, in terms of semiconductors, in terms of aviation, or in terms of banks, from being able to sell to global markets and then really hurting their own operations without building up whatever is the next semiconductor, whatever is the next great engine, to still maintain the dollar in the centrality of the financial system, well then, it probably isn’t able to do these sort of things anymore. You’re absolutely right that in the first instance, this was the right thing to do in response to invasion, but now the West needs to take the longer term step, the second step, of building up the next great technology, such that everyone in the world still wants to buy the best products on the planet which should be in American Western hands.
We shall see, I’m sure we’ll have an opportunity to talk again soon. I’m happy for you that you got out of Shanghai, you would probably be too depressed to talk to otherwise, so good for us, good for our listeners, and thanks for taking the time.
DW: I really enjoy this waltz that we are constantly going through Ben, to perhaps ultimately conciliate our positions into something mutual, and I hope you’re able to take care in quarantine.
Well, thank you. I look forward to talking to you again, soon.
This Daily Update Interview is also available as a podcast. To receive it in your podcast player, visit Stratechery.
The Daily Update is intended for a single recipient, but occasional forwarding is totally fine! If you would like to order multiple subscriptions for your team with a group discount (minimum 5), please contact me directly.
Thanks for being a supporter, and have a great day!