 Welcome to Building Tomorrow, a show exploring the ways that tech, innovation, and entrepreneurship are creating a freer, wealthier, and more peaceful world. As always, I'm your host, Paul Matzko, and with me in the studio today are Aaron Powell, who's the editor and director for Libertarianism.org, and Will Duffield, who's research assistant and editor of Prototype. Today we're talking about China because that's a manageable topic for a 40-minute conversation. All of China, guys. You ready? More specifically, we're going to look at the ways in which China is technologically leapfrogging the US and Europe. In the US, we've long had a superiority complex, what with Silicon Valley and Al Gore inventing the internet. But while we've been resting on our laurels, China's been adopting new tech at much faster rates than we have here. So Will, why don't you kick us off with a description of the company WeChat and how that it functions in Chinese society and the economy. So it's a social media app and effectively an everything app. Say, description from one of the articles we'll be discussing, a logic mag piece, with the author speaking to someone saying, I use WeChat to message a friend while standing in the middle of a rice patty to pay for snacks and water in a remote village to buy train tickets, book hotel rooms, order taxis, get takeout, send my aunt photos. If I wanted to, I could also use it to pay electricity bills, top up my mobile phone account, make hospital appointments and check the weather. For most of us, doing that would go through the entire front page of our phones app lineup and in many cases it'd be difficult to find an app to do some of these things. So both the simplicity, the holistic nature of this and its accessibility seems really tremendous, especially given that I as an American or a Westerner usually view myself as at the forefront of technological development. Well, it's a billion users use WeChat's kind of holistic system, which for sake of comparison that's almost, not quite, but almost the population of the United States and Europe combined. So when we talk about mass adoption rates, that's pretty impressive. I know that we like to point to something like this as like, this is so cool and this is the future and that as you framed it, this is ahead of where we are in the U.S., like as you said, Will, that for us to do that, we would have to use all of the apps on our phone. But I guess I will be the guy who throws cold water on it and wonders, so what? Why is this so much neater than what we have now? So everything we just listed, pay for snacks and water, you can do that. There's all sorts of payment, you know, you can use Apple Pay as accepted, you know, tons and tons of merchants and other, you know, there are alternatives to that. We can send videos, we can send pictures, we can book hotel rooms, we can order taxis, we can get takeout. We can send photos. I mean, we can't necessarily do the making hospital appointments. But people don't tend to, we don't make a lot of hospital appointments anyway. So yes, these are currently spread across in apps. But bundling them all in a single app, which ends up looking like a web browser, that's ultimately what this turns into is you just have, you have a web browser except it looks like chat rooms and you pull up your chat room with your hospital or your taxi and send them text as opposed to popping open the Uber app and clicking send me a cab. But the other thing, and this I think is a theme for the discussion of technology in China is I am made really uncomfortable by the notion of all of that data going through a single app that is almost certainly sharing all sorts of data with the Chinese government. So what's, why is bundled more high tech than decoupled in this area? I mean, one thing if like you actually asked why it's neater and it is because it's neater. It's neat. It's tidy. You can manage a host of accounts across different platforms and when it comes to say the purported ubiquity of Apple Pay, it isn't really ubiquity. There are many who accept Apple Pay. There are many who only accept some other form of niche mobile payment and realizing when you're in the checkout line that you've decided or fallen into frequenting a store that uses an alternative system trying to download the app then and there and make yourself ready for this discrete shopping experience, isn't very pleasant. On the data collection side, well in a sense this looks much more centralized. I think many aspects of our data collection and advertising experience are far more cohesive and centralized on the back end more so than we give them credit for. If you look to something like Verizon's oath system, the number of websites which participate in that, while it might not be immediately apparent to the end user, it's very far reaching and when you bring in the layer of data brokers behind, I'm not sure whether you end up with an infoscape that's ultimately all that different. And something I would add which would be to say that adoption rate matters even if the tech isn't any different than tech that we currently use, though with some exceptions like it is hard to use an app right now to schedule a hospital appointment. You can do it. Actually our provider here, the Kato Health Insurance provider, they do have an app that you can use to do appointments but that's the first time I've ever had that in my life and I'm not sure very few Americans actually do it that way. But again, it's just the sheer adoption rate matters too. So for any of these individual services, yes we have that option here in the U.S. but what percentage of Americans with smartphones use Apple Pay or a similar service and as a large percentage of their transactions, I don't know the exact number. I would guess single digits. Even those of us who do have that capability, a minority of my purchases are done using that technology. I still use a credit card or cash. Is that the other thing that's going on then here too is that part of the reason that you don't use Apple Pay much and I don't use Apple Pay much and that the U.S. hasn't consolidated, the merchants haven't all consolidated around a single one and so you see the little stickers saying use Android Pay and Google Pay because Google seems to have multiple competing standards of everything that it does and Apple Pay and all these other things is because as a society, everyone has access to debit cards. We've had these things forever. They're ubiquitous. They're easy to use. They're actually not that much more difficult than pulling out your phone would be or in the case of WeChat scanning a QR code like sticking the thing and hoping that the chip gets read is not too much of a problem and so we have kind of good enough tech whereas rural China or other third world places didn't have access to credit or bank accounts on plastic and so this is the technology they embraced. I think that's quite true. We have a line from Jack Ma saying people happily shop online because they haven't seen Walmart's everywhere. If you don't have that prior experience on the downside, you haven't had that and the ubiquity of Walmart has been great for millions of Americans but at the same time those norms hold you back to some extent and in China they didn't exist. Yeah. The technical term for this is leapfrogging. I put that in the intro on purpose which is this idea that when you have an older established infrastructure that there's a lot of sunk cost than that, a lot of investment and so that can actually lead a more developed society to be slower on the uptake than a less advanced society when it comes to the next generation of tech. The classic example of this is how big swaths of Sub-Saharan Africa had higher smartphone adoption rates than the US did for quite a while. We actually had to catch up with them when it came to using payment systems like M-Pesa and various smartphone services because they didn't have landline phones. They didn't have wired internet structure so basically they're going from nothing to cell phone towers and skipping over the wired stage and so I think you see some that same thing going on here in China where they, because rural China, I mean the striking juxtaposition in the description that Will gave from one of the stories, it's that combination of pigs running around in rice fields like the pre-modern and then bam, drone deliveries. It's not actually in that description but elsewhere. Talk about a rural village in China and along comes a drone delivery that drops a package with seven packages for local members of the village on a target spot in the center of town. Even those of us who are kind of plugged into the tech world, we can't do that here. I mean there it's not just a matter of adoption rate, they're doing stuff that we can, we're only thinking about doing in the next couple of years. But again, I wonder how much of the kind of G-Wiz factor of it is simply that this is different from the way that we do things. So let's take drone deliveries in rural China. The idea being that a drone can come into the village with three to five packages packed into a bin under it, it gets dropped off and then someone can take those to the other people. So the cool part about that is it's a drone and drones are neat and they're loud and they look cool and they're robots and they come in and they land on a little thing and it's very cyberpunk. But the only reason that they're doing that is because they lack the infrastructure that we have. Because if you were that similar setup would be a terribly inefficient way to deliver packages in the U.S. because you can only take a handful of these things and stick them in this drone, whereas we've got roads and trucks that can drive on those roads that can carry much, much more and get it to you faster and more efficiently. So are we kind of almost fetishizing the very fact that these things are different than the way that we do things when in fact they still haven't caught up to our last gen tech in terms of their actual efficacy? But our last gen tech was pretty expensive to implement all of those highways being built, the car production, cost of fuels for the trucks, etc. And the idea that you can get there or good enough by jumping immediately to drones seems revolutionary. I suppose the question is like you have to compare kind of apples that oranges, which is from a base state, so from the state of nature. The question is, is delivery via FedEx superior to delivery by drone, starting from nothing? And I think the answer as being shown in this jump from pre-modern to modern going on in rural China is that it is more efficient starting from zero to go immediately to drone delivery, which means that they can save on the amount of capital investment that had to go into building all that road and vehicular transport is massive and so they're able to save that. China as a nation is able to save that capital and spend it towards other things, thus increasing national prosperity over the long term. So that's how I would say it, which is that you're right, but we're not comparing state of nature to state of nature. We're comparing this built infrastructure. At the same time though, if those technologies are, they have the potential, I mean there's a reason why Amazon's interested in drone delivery here, they think that even with our built up capital expenditure infrastructure system, drone deliveries might still be a more efficient way of delivering at some point in the future. But since they're there first, they're going to reap the benefits of that system more quickly than we are and arguably have a bigger role in developing it and reap more literal profit from that technology than we currently do. They're going to have the founder effect, in other words, that we have kind of had with the internet here in the US. So I mean I think it does matter. It's a good caution. It's a good caution though that it's easy to get so caught up in, wow drones are cool, wouldn't that be neat if a drone dropped off stuff in my yard when it's actually kind of cool that FedEx can drop off things too? I mean it's new therefore we assume it's better and I think that's a... And an interesting element of this that stuck out in the New Yorker article was the extent to which much of this infrastructure, the JD or Jingdong delivery infrastructure seemed less formal particularly in rural areas and more able to make itself compatible with human rhythms in a way that perhaps the delivery driver in the US used to do but that today particularly thinking about some of the ways apps have moved into this on the delivery backend side, geolocation, tagging delivery times, etc. that that system has become very inflexible. Here we see the delivery driver in a rural Chinese village saying people phone to ask him to drop off a package at the local market or post office or even medical clinic, kind of real time shifting the drop off location in a way that if I try to do that with Amazon now it just doesn't work. There's no one I can contact let alone to shift the drop off point. But how much of that is a factor of they can get away with it because they're not doing that many deliveries? Like part of the reason that it would be hard for Amazon to allow you to switch up where you were delivering or change the time in the Washington DC metro area is because they're doing such an extraordinary number of deliveries all day that scheduling is very important, route design is very important. If we had only a handful of people if it was just a rural that that kind of relaxed pace works when you don't have scaling issues, when you're dealing with small numbers, but when you're dealing with large numbers, it's quite difficult. But even when you're doing Amazon deliveries in rural America, you don't get that. So that could be a factor of A, there's not much demand for it. Or B, that it would be more difficult to implement this in a piecemeal way like to say, well, we're going to only implement it in rural America and not the rest of America than to have the same system across the board. But again, I think this also gets to you can do all sorts of cool stuff on a bespoke level when you're not doing much of it, but when you're doing the lack of scale here from also the articles that we read for today discussed, you have a single delivery driver whose job is to bring stuff to people in a small town and he kind of covers that small town and he's doing a handful of deliveries a day versus the, I don't know how many deliveries the average UPS guy does in the DC metro area, but I feel safe in assuming it's a lot more. Though perhaps the better way to think of that driver is that like, I mean, they talk about in there, like when we're talking about the transformation of rural China, we're still talking about, they're expecting the market to double or triple in size over the next two years. There's still hundreds of millions. I mean, the entire, there's more than the entire population of the US that's still in these rural, in the rural hinterlands that are only recently being reached by something that's now taken for granted in the more urban regions. So these delivery guys, they might even, I think thought of them as I read the articles as loss leaders. I mean, they're like brand ambassadors who are building up the reputation and laying the foundation for more volume and more profitability and that's how I thought of them. I imagine the cities, things like JD and WeChat system, they all are a whole lot more, they look a whole lot more like it would say here in Washington DC when it comes to Amazon deliveries. And maybe labor costs play a role in this as well in terms of the number of rural delivery men you can employ in this sort of system, what the other available alternatives in terms of work for them would be. But at the same time, I do, I don't know, maybe the way the pieces are written, but there, there seemed to be a comforting lack of formality that suffused a large part of this, which I often don't see in American tech mediated interactions. There was an element, so there was a point which as they were describing the kind of close knit rural, almost a sense of tribe, of extended family where everyone knows what everyone else is doing. They have to pull together and really just to feed themselves in the village and that space is now being penetrated by this new network. And so right now there's this blend of a kind of pre-modern community organized sub-cultural system where everyone knows each other, where there's this sense of like strong neighborhood and local identity, meeting a new bourgeois way of thinking, you know, kind of the global middle class way of consumer capitalism. And like right now they're kind of coexisting with various degrees of comfort. But like one is replacing the other. Right, yes. So one's replacing the other. So that sense of like, you know, there's the grandma who runs the corner store and there's the, you know, I mean, all that, that intimate, the intimacy of that situation is, could be on the way out. I mean, it's like here in the U.S., we don't know our delivery drivers, we don't know who makes our stuff. And we're fine with that because we've had the cultural alienation and atomization that goes with being middle class Americans that we take for granted. So that sense of what we're picking up here on with the delivery drivers, knowing people, knowing local conditions, this is kind of an intermediary stage. And the, you know, I mean, obviously all tech comes with cultural implications, but that is an aspect of that that doesn't really get delved into in all that much depth in these articles, I don't think you can see it in the background, but it's not really a major category of analysis. Something else here. So we've been talking about a lot of tech and transportation. I thought as libertarians, we'd be interested in this, which is the social organization aspect of this, where one of the major towns that's featured in the logic piece is Shenzhen, which is a, it was a new city essentially established in the 80s by the Chinese government. They basically said, look, we don't want to end up like the Soviet Union. We're going to allow some capitalist experimentation in these like free zones, like the area around Hong Kong, inland from Hong Kong and places like Shenzhen. So the town grows from 30,000 to 12 million in under like three decades. Kind of early startup city. Yeah, exactly. That's what remind me of was like, everyone talks about with like free cities, charter cities, even seasteading. We actually have real world examples of that in communist China, which is a fascinating juxtaposition, which I think raises a question. So this is an old chestnut for libertarians to chew on, but the distinction between like, we like to think of ourselves in the United States as ostensibly a free market economy, right? And China as a communist country. And so on the level of rhetoric, our rhetoric is very different. But when you get down in, when you actually get into the weeds, places like Shenzhen actually seem like a lot easier and freer replaced to run a business in significant ways than it would be in the United States. That kind of entrepreneurial spirit that's on view there was quite striking to me. So I mean, what do you guys think of that idea? I mean, should we view Shenzhen and the regional district, the free economic zones in China as a fulfillment of that kind of charter city idea? I mean, they're market economies. I like Tyler Cowan's comment on this in Bloomberg. He has a China Proves Marx Right piece arguing that while China was previously Maoist and elevated the peasant, it is now a properly Marxist society in that it is understood that you must move through industrial capitalism in order to get anywhere really. And whether what comes out of that on the other end down the road is something that could be described as communism doesn't matter all that much. It's simply that in order to go from an agricultural pastoral pseudo feudal society to something beyond that you do need industrial capitalism. I think that it is awfully easy to slide into thinking that China represents the new right way to do things or a way that ought to be emulated or that their apparent economic dynamism is something that we should strive for because I think there's a lot of other stuff going on behind the scenes here. So yes, these companies can make all this stuff and yes, we see all this tremendous growth, but there's lots of stuff being made in the U.S. and on the tech side, there's an extraordinary amount of innovation going on whereas in China, a lot of the innovation seems to be we're manufacturing products that were designed in America or we're building products that were originally innovated. We take a knockoff version of something that was built in America and then we innovate on top of it and all of this is happening with a lot of non-freedom too, right? So these big companies in China all are basically cowering under the Communist Party. The Communist Party can shut them down at any time. We have the head of this JD.com gave a speech where he says explicitly that in the glorious future all of these companies will be state run and he's doing that because that's what the Communist Party wants to hear. And the examples of CEOs of these companies, you do something that steps out of line and all of a sudden you are prosecuted for nebulous crimes and everything's taken from you. So yes, we can take away that if you let people start businesses, people will start businesses and cool things will happen, but we don't need to learn that message from China. We've known that and there are other places that that has happened and we can watch that happening in the U.S., but I think the concern is that and this is Thomas Friedman has written things about this, like that China is going to overtake us and that the reason is because they've got this strong government that can make things happen. I think he did this in like talking about like renewable energy or green industry or something like that and the history of that stuff ultimately failing of command and control or over strong government ultimately killing the golden goose is long. There's no reason to think it won't happen here. The huge growth in China is to a great extent a product of the fact that they started way, way behind where we were and that early growth is much easier than the sustained stuff. So I think that we need to be careful about lionizing this and I think that we need to be wary of seeing the numbers are very big. There's a billion people using WeChat, but there's a lot of people in China. They simply have a much larger population and so how much we get kind of dazzled by big numbers when what's actually happening is not terribly exciting outside of the big numbers. But that matters as much as or in my mind more so than the sort of Friedman, the large state keeping everyone in line or giving national direction allows this to happen. Size produces agglomeration effects there that we couldn't imagine occurring in the United States. And when we look at the positive side, not necessarily of governance per se, or state governance, but the expectation there of in the face of its breach or lack, you have a great deal of unregulated development, perhaps not intentionally occurring, not provided for by state policy, but happening in an ungoverned liminal space between expectations of state control and the reality on the ground that provides, in many ways, a freer regulatory environment than you have in the United States. If you want to build a new coal-fired power plant, you just go and do it. And now certainly some people have been whacked for doing so, but for everyone who gets in trouble, there are three others still just doing it. So Thomas Friedman has the wrong takeaway from what's happening in China. It's not the large state that's the key to success, the command economy, massive state investment, solar panels, production, etc. I think what's happening in China is valuable because it's a reminder that we have to look more granularly than these big picture rhetorical arguments. Trying to compare the U.S. as one giant system versus China as a giant system misses all the really interesting stuff happening on the local or more granular level. So that Shenzhen's success as a free market city, essentially a free city, a charter city, that can tell us something. That's a tree that gets lost in the forest when you look at China as a whole. Just as people often wake to comparison that Sweden, despite having a larger welfare state and ostensibly often the socialist government, actually has freer trade and freer markets in significant ways than the United States does. And looking to Shenzhen in particular, one of the things we see coming out of it is this Shanxi culture, which is originally a word used to derivatively describe knockoffs. Louis Vuitton bags. But more broadly speaks to a sort of copyright-free mix-and-match open source culture that goes far beyond software. And in the United States, most of our experience with open source comes on the software side or somewhat ironically with certain products that were originally developed by the government. You look to say the AR15 platform and because it was public domain from the get-go, you see a very vibrant marketplace there for add-ons, alterations, small parts manufacturers to get in on the game. So there, in a sort of instance discrete fashion, I think it does provide a valuable lesson certainly for copyright skeptics in the United States or the West. However, more broadly, I think a lot of what I'm seeing in China at the moment reminds me of the West in the 19th century and the sense of dynamism and opportunity you saw there, particularly looking at the experience of Shanghai, this white glove delivery driver who went from working in the fields in his home town, went off and did some years in the army where he crucially learned to drive, and now goes around in his car with a suit, white gloves, with possibility. He talks about holding gold bars, delivering them as gifts essentially for a hedge fund being mistaken for a lawyer and he frankly sounds like a character in a Victorian novel, that life story and the opportunity inherent in it. Yeah, he says in the story that his teachers told him that to succeed, you need to know, well preferably all three, but at least one of the three skills, how to speak English, so English fluency, computer programming skills, and how to drive. He wasn't good at the first two, but he knew how to drive, therefore he got this job as a delivery man. But as I was reading that, and this is a this moment presented to you by a history nerd, it remind me of it, there's actually a book by a historian named Tom, he's actually I think a American studies literature guy, but Thomas Oxt called The Clerks Tale, which is about 19th century, this new class of white collar clerks who staffed all the offices popping up around America that were running the kind of industrialization of the United States. And it's out of that class of dynamic, entrepreneurially minded clerks who were obsessed as young men with improving their rhetoric, essentially their English fluency, though they already ostensibly knew English, but their base literacy, they're obsessed with that going to Chautauqua Lectures, and you know the 19th century version of Ted Talks, they were hustlers trying to get ahead, trying to find their angle. It's out of that class of clerks of this new white collar class that you get Andrew Carnegie, that you get a number of major titans of industry a generation later that play the massive role in the development and the kind of incredible prosperity of America in the early 20th century. And that's why I was reminded of when I read the story of Shang that like what's going on there right now is something that we saw take place in our American society in the mid 19th century that led to massive gains in productivity a generation later. So I thought that was actually quite interesting that you have all these, they're learning skills that will help them in the global economy in the future. And who knows who knows what that looks like. I mean who knows which one's the next one that's going to be the head of the head of WeChat or the new JD who were themselves basically hustlers like what we're describing. We should probably transition here at the end. So if Aaron's been a bit more bearish about some of the prospects here, while Will and I have been more bullish, here's something I think all of us would share concerns about, we're all going to be bearish on the topic of Chinese state censorship and surveillance, though there are some intriguing pushback against the state use of technology to keep tabs on citizens. But first let's look at the revelation of that Google has a new project they call the Dragon the Fly project, which is not quite as sinister as like Octopus I suppose, but Dragonfly itself like the global octopus with its tentacles reaching into every part of society. What is the Google Dragonfly project, Will? So this is a search engine that they were developing under wraps in order to enter the Chinese search market. And I for my part just can't understand why they would go there, what they really seek to gain by stepping into this market. A billion people. But they won't. The Chinese state is very protectionist. They aren't going to allow a Western search engine to come in and win. So that just seems off the table from the get-go. So the idea of Google shedding legitimacy in other places, particularly places in which they're coming under newfound regulatory threat for a snowball's chance in hell at this market. They're not calling them dumb, but I can't understand what they're going for. When I saw the story broke, when I saw the story break and I saw it, Google was willing to put together a heavily censored version of their search engine and not just, you could think of censoring that's just irritating. We're not going to show access to certain Western movies or we're going to block access to certain Western sites, but this was ideologically censoring. You're not going to be able to look up stuff on freedom of expression and important human rights issues that the Chinese government tends not to be a fan of. My first thought was Google's come a long way from its don't be evil days, but also, yes, this seems a little bit odd and it seems like, yeah, I think you're right that they're not, even if they do this, they're not going to get a certain market. Their search dominant in India just concentrate there. But the real concern is if Google's willing to do this, what else are they willing to do at the behest of the Chinese government when their phones are, I mean, we started this off by talking about how ubiquitous smartphones are and how everyone is doing everything in their lives on smartphones. And Google is a big part of the smartphone market, especially in poorer countries, Android, far outstrips, iOS. So what sorts of Chinese government requested features are going to be baked into Android, baked into other Google platforms like Gmail that we might not know about or that are substantially more troubling than Chinese people not having access to certain web pages? That was where the really troubling aspect of it was to me. And that stuff, all of this circumvention stuff that we talk about, like you can install VPNs, you can use encrypted chat stuff, that's all well and good. But if the hardware or the OS is compromised in some way, then none of that matters. And so that's where my concern is. If Google's willing to back down on principle here, where else are they willing to back down? Well, not just for the Chinese government because you would think that institutionally Google would be more skeptical of Chinese government demands than perhaps those made by the governments of the United States or Great Britain. But at the same time, if they're willing to do this for China, what are they willing to do for our state? And that leads you to potentially some very scary conclusions as well along all of those axes you've just described. Yeah, I mean, I suppose you're right, Erin. It's not surprising that we would expect that whatever search company is going to be allowed to operate in China on a major basis is of course going to have to play by the rules set up by the Chinese Communist Party, whether it's Google or whether it's Alibaba, I think they own the current dominant chat search. That's to be expected. So it's not surprising that that happened, but the implications for those of us who do rely on Google in the United States, it is a little more disconcerting. I mean, I do think it's quite understandable why they're doing it. I mean, I disagree with them. I do think the Google brand should take a hit over here because of their willingness to compromise their... But why do you think they're doing it? Well, I think they're doing it because of money. So like, again, Google has what percentage of the what, 380 million people in the United States depend on Google solely for their Gmail and Google for their search and various Google products for their daily life? A very large percentage. What percentage of Chinese internet users would you have to have to reach that same number? A much smaller percentage. They don't have to be market dominant in China to make some serious money, especially given the level of usage. Why don't you just focus on India, especially given expected future geopolitical tensions between the two states? You would imagine that there would be trade-offs in terms of market access between the two at some point in the future. And there are more people to come online in India than China is a percentage of the population. Now, China... India is only what, 1.3 billion versus China's 1.7. But you're still talking about tremendous gains to be made there rather than trying to step into this new market. Well, Google doesn't want to have to choose. I mean, the CEO, Sundar Pinchai, his quote is, I care about servicing users globally in every corner, which is an unfortunate choice of words. On the military, they serve as targets. Google is for everyone. Yeah, right. But I don't know if he's going to have to choose between India or China. They're going to make plays everywhere. I mean, it's one of the largest companies in the world, number two, number one. I don't know what alphabet it is right now. So that is disconcerting for those of us. I rely on Gmail. I mean, it is the dominant part of my workflow and is for many Americans. There was something else encouraging coming out of China where you see a kind of a citizen resistance to state surveillance and attempts at censorship. This is the story about using the Ethereum blockchain to disseminate information that Chinese government censors wanted squelched. So there was a major drug manufacturer in China that sold some fake vaccines. There was press reporting on these fake vaccines. Chinese people were angry. And so the state censor system, their Internet monitor bureaucrats shut down the official press and social media coverage. So a pseudonymous citizen decided to add the story to the Ethereum blockchain. It cost them 0.001 either, which at the time of the story was about $0.47 U.S. And that can't be censored. It's on the blockchain. So anyone who can access the Ethereum blockchain can read this account of fake vaccines being peddled by a party-approved major drug manufacturer. I always wonder, and particularly thinking about China here where you have a state which has the capacity to be very heavy-handed, seeks to be somewhat responsive to the concerns of its citizenry for legitimacy reasons, whether when you see both a censored Internet and then some with access or in this case paying a little bit of money to access this story, whether that's used as a signal by the state. People are frustrated enough about, in this case, this fake vaccine firm that they're willing to pay money to discover the truth here, we'd better crack down on them hard. And to what extent that can be used in order to provide more effective or responsive governance, just because here you have this sort of baked-in costing of preferences. That's interesting thought. Well, I mean, just to clarify, the $0.47 is the amount that it cost to put it on the blockchain. It's free to read it. So all that we know is that it was worth $0.47 to one person, which doesn't tell us a lot. No. But even in terms of circumventing censorship more broadly, there's a risk there which sends a signal that it's meaningful to someone. And while the connections of the vaccine manufacturer to some state entity may have their own value, at some point, countervailing signals are or ought to be taken into account. I'm not sure how it all shakes out there, but it does seem like an interesting demonstration of preference. And there's value in, I mean, essentially what we're talking about is lowering the cost of entering a black market for information. And I won't belabor the comparison, but during the 1980s, there was this thriving black market for cultural artifacts from the West, movies and music circulating in the Eastern Bloc, Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc. It was the cost of getting that information widely accessible was quite high. You had to actually smuggle the original copy, make copies of American DVD, and then make potentially, you know, find ways around blocks on DVD players for Western. You know, it was a whole expensive black market industry and distribution process. But if you can put that information on a blockchain for 47 cents, it's that much easier to escape censorship. I mean, again, these new technological forms, I think, have the possibility to accelerate and expand the ability to dissent even in a more controlling state. You're talking about very different forms of information there, though. Looking back to the Eastern Bloc, for the most part, we're talking about entertainment goods, like consumption goods. When it comes to China today, Hollywood tries to sell their entertainment there. It doesn't tend to do very well. They really struggle to market it, even though folks have access. And the information that people are paying to gain access to has a far greater influence on health questions, political questions, et cetera. But it's operationalized very differently. Yeah. So, I mean, there is a difference between the specific goods. So, we could go into more discussion on that. I think we're out of time for today. So, until next week, thank you for listening to Building Tomorrow and be well.