to the the other large topic i i wanted to tackle and you talk about it at length and by the way as any observer would see on the screen or taking the cover of your book the red pill the blue pill so the matrix analogy of what is it that you want to keep living in your illusionary world versus uh looking trying to look at reality as it is that takes us to the business strategy and and i use the word a bit in a hesitating way because we talk business strategy but it's often the government does the business strategy so it's strategy as such how does it come together also with our immediately previous topic with freedom and order and having a communist party and a system which is essentially hierarchical and top-down and how does that come together with the whole nature of innovation of trial and error of trying to do small experiments and see which one works and then

scale it yeah i think that's one of the biggest misunderstandings of china is that we we do see china's hierarchical top-down bureaucratic very formal very transact transactional uh not so visionary in a way i mean they do have these plans but it's it's almost like they always reach the plan so The problem is that we see it that way, and then it doesn't make any sense when we then see a country that's becoming one of the most innovatives in the world, because that's all about experimenting.

So if you're that formal and you're that rigid in a way, how can you then create this whole engine? And I think that's where the big misunderstanding is.

It is the fact that China, for a long, long time, always has been more decentralized than we realized.

That means that both from the government point of view, local governments have a lot of authority and autonomy to ultimately decide things on their own, because it's impossible for Xi Jinping and Beijing to basically... have a strategy for 1.4 billion people, 6 million factories, and every Chinese that wants to be an entrepreneur.

It's impossible.

So they all have to have this autonomy.

So tell me more what's behind that.

And why do you think there's such an interest, you know, or why do you think China has become cool?

Well, good to see you and thanks for inviting me.

I do believe that China has become cool for about a year, year and a half, but definitely this year.

And this has everything to do, of course, with the fact that when it comes to technology and innovation, a lot of things have come on the radar of the world that was unknown to the world before.

it started about one and a half year ago with deep seek and people were wondering what does this mean with ai and is china doing something that we don't know about and so suddenly everybody got interested but then later on when unitree came up with the the robots on the gala of the chinese new year That was really when everybody started noticing, wow, China is really cool.

And then from there on, this is about a year and a half ago, it just escalated.

And every few months, there was more and more on innovation and technology.

Do you think technology sometimes itself is becoming part of the Chinese cultural attraction here? Oh, definitely.

How did you look at this whole story?

Well, I looked at it with my Chinese lens, but I also had my daughter who looked at it from her perspective.

It was like, yeah, no, it's not going to happen.

Really? Is it going to happen? And she was following all these Americans basically leaving the site and saying goodbye like they were Somebody had died in their family or something.

It was really, really sad.

It was quite interesting.

She was updating me every single hour and saying, and everybody's revealing all their secrets because they know they won't be able to be on TikTok anymore.

So is any of that true or were those rumors?