Molson Hart: China and Amazon, Up Close - #60
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- čas přidán 13. 06. 2024
- Molson Hart is the CEO of Viahart, an educational toy company. He has deep experience selling products manufactured in China, using Amazon and other platforms. He produced a documentary about the challenges Amazon's market dominance creates for sellers and buyers worldwide. His recent video about a recent trip to visit factories in China went viral, generating millions of views on X.
Molson Hart on X: x.com/Molson_Hart
Amazon Documentary: • Amazon - Market. Power...
Steve and Molson discuss:
0:00 Introduction
1:22 Molson Hart's background, experience in China
5:26 The IQ Question
13:19 Entrepreneurship and China
38:40 Selling on Amazon
48:32 Alternatives and Competitors to Amazon
50:40 The Future of Amazon
55:30 Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
57:27 Understanding China
1:07:43 China's Rising Global Influence
1:16:12 Personal and National Identities
1:18:45 Demographics: China's Future
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Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai., SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU.
Please send any questions or suggestions to manifold1podcast@gmail.com or Steve on X @hsu_steve.
Molson is on a roll with the media and podcast appearances.
Molson fucks
On the subject of demographics, people don't appreciate the timescale over which this so-called "problem" will play out. We're talking 50-100 years, which is an enormous amount of time in technological development terms. We don't know where automation and AI will be, and whether it'll even make sense to think about a human economy in the way we do today. We don't know where medicine will be and what a human lifespan will look like. We don't know where reproductive technology will be, whether it'll be possible to create human embryos with synthetic genomes and bring them to term in artificial wombs. Considering "demographics" alone without these other questions is meaningless.
Exactly appropriate. Indeed, one of the key measurable "parameters" historically pertaining to the phenomenon of unceasing exponential development comes in the drastically lowering of many "critical values", a jargon term that is to be meant in the sense of the conventional theory of differential equations in general. For instance, in many ancient hunter and gatherer societies, the proportion of such societies that which must be involved in agriculture was almost prohibitively high, where significant proportions of entire hunter/gatherer societies would play some role in contexts of agriculture - if the proportion of agriculturalists in such societies were to drop between "critical values", if there were insufficient numbers of hunters or gatherers, for example, then their entire society collapses. This means that those roles of philosophers, of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, are impractical.
With the advent of agriculture, as aided by such innovations as "calender systems" whether in the ancient Middle-East or the ancient Sinosphere, the unceasing trend in human history, in general and accounting for stochastic fluctuations, was the continued drastic lowering of many of these critical values in order for society to not merely survive, but thrive. Over time, the proportion of certain societies that which must be involved as agriculturalists had continued to drop, by orders of magnitudes, down to the 10%, the 1%, and so on and on, due to continued technological innovations.
For the PRC, not merely due to significant and non-trivial developments in an incredible diversity of advanced technological subfields as in areas of computer vision or in areas of rich communications networks (e.g., 5G, 6G, etc.), but that urbanization rates continue to rise so much so that these critical values continue to drop in rapid fashion. Thus, a simple anticipation is that, with increasing productivity and efficiency in general, merely a smaller and smaller proportion of the PRC would be required to occupy certain key roles in order to not only prevent societal collapse, but to allow the flourishing of a society. Indeed, many auxiliaries are available, whether in the fact that the PRC is positioned to dominate many of the key modern technological industries as in areas of EVs or renewables thus escaping the middle-income trap, or, that the PRC boasts the greatest acceleration in its Fourth Industrial Revolution, the country that boasts the greatest number of lighthouse factories, and so on and on. In fact, as a single shipyard of the PRC today demonstrates a ship-building capacity that is approximately 200 times greater than that of the U.S., what is ironic is that such a shipyard, the Jiangnan shipyard, sees increasingly fewer laborers and human operators, and is increasingly automated by the STEM human capital of the younger generations that are slowly cycling into the workforce - that, the PRC can enjoy significantly greater productivity due to technological success, while only requiring a much smaller proportion of their demographics to be engaged in such fields relative to traditional workforces. If the younger generations are disinterested in toiling physically in said shipyards, such is not an issue as their physical labor would be more of a liability than an asset, since human productivity is no match for the successful integration of automated entities today as demonstrated so well by the PRC.
To ignore the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the PRC today would be analogous to ignoring the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom during some time in the early 19th-century and late 18th-century - note that the Qing Dynasty was significantly wealthier than the UK during those periods, but not in areas that matter. Perhaps their Chinas, their teas, their silvers were valuated extremely highly as is the case with, say, financial derivatives of the U.S. market today, but these are not what matters, not from the perspective of the Universe in its laws of nature. For many economic pundits of the West to ignore the exagerrated scientific and industrial revolution that which is underway today in the PRC is indeed short-sighted and foolish, and the PRC possesses many incredible fortunes, including in its younger demographics that are positioned so well for STEM in the 21st-century, that certain comprehensive analysis would even suggest that the "demographical bomb" is essentially a non-issue.
Note that many supplementary materials can be provided. For instance, for the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests which had become very G-loaded in recent times due to their attempt to avoid regurgitation, Chinese students persistently dominate overwhelmingly, and Dr. Hsu, having advised Ph.D. students, would no doubt understand intuitively the not insignificant importance of a high G-factor for a demographic in the aggregate.
@@cls-py8uh The term "hunter-gatherer" does not mean "farmer."
China doesn't administer the PISA. Only a few elite Chinese cities administer it. Ergo, China does not dominate PISA, it games PISA.
What you say is true. A supplement: the number of intelligent people in the workforce affects techno-advances. That number is already declining globally, including in China.
@@kreek22 This is a common misconception, since the PISA tests does compare high-performance tail-ends of different demographics. Some interesting results include such results as, high-performance tail-ends of such countries as the Philippines are merely able to overlap with the low-performance tail-ends of the PRC, or, that when filtering, extremely, for high-performance tail-ends of such countries as the U.S. or Australia, Chinese ethnic groups in the aggregate disproportionately dominate (this holds true everywhere else including in Singapore and the Philippines).
It was a peculiar discovery that, for instance, in the 2009 PISA tests, the performance of Chinese Australians are somewhat comparable with that of the Chinese Shanghainese, far above the mean-average of Australia, although such a gap had widened significantly in favor of the PRC.
To put it bluntly, such countries as the U.S. can try to "game" the system by only insisting on, say, their highest performing state in Massachusetts, and they would still fall short significantly especially if they fail to filter for Chinese-Americans in the aggregate. In order to game the system, they must make use of the Chinese-American demographics disproportionately overwhelmingly - note that such is demonstrated in the International Mathematics Olympiads and continues into the Putnam exams. Whatever the mechanisms, the PRC possesses the largest quantity of these tail-ends, and it shows in their elite cognitive performances including in modern STEM subfields today. Thus, even such counterparts as Nature had identified the PRC as the most STEM productive country in metrics of quality, and their STEM productivity, and quality, continues to accelerate.
@@kreek22PISA is dominated by East Asians, not just Chinese, and some Scandinavian. My kids was in the top 30% while in Chinese schools but went to the top 5-10% after they migrated to Australia and join the secondary school there. Chinese are not all smart or the smartest but they are just a lot more of the smarter ones. At least in academic, but from where I stand most are soft physically in strength and endurance. And also lower in verbal IQ compared to Jews, whites and Indians. Nobody gets everything.
I'd love to see you do an episode discussing China's Social Credit System. The details of what it is, and the pros and cons. When discussed in western media, it is invariably presented as an Orwellian dystopia ... but I would be interested to hear a more balanced discussion. It occurs to me that the system allows the government to set the incentives of its citizens in a very direct way, and so I think this aspect could be analysed through an economist's lens. ie. economists generally design policies with the aim of setting the right incentives - and so it would be interesting to consider the possibilities of this incentive-focused approach in China's Social Credit system.
@49:19 - only certain things are cheaper on Aliexpress after best discounts
@45:08 - some sellers have their own non-Amazon online stores but Amazon's return policy/process is still better
I suppose it might be interesting to add that, from a certain perspective, it is almost by "definition" that the Sinosphere is one of the most significant human entities regarding fundamental "zero to one" inventions of the human species being one of the few cradles of civilizations - Europe, which is not a cradle of civilization, required importing vast swathes of technologies and STEM notions ranging from agricultural techniques to decimal-styled proto-analysis of the Indians and Persian algebra (note that Persian algebra would remain quintessential in European universities for centuries after its import as popularized by such expositions as The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, and where the likes of "Fibonacci" would dedicate comprehensive treatise documenting the mathematical and arithmetical superiority of a proto-analytic styled decimal arithmetic). More than that is that even such simple inventions as the wheel barrow had actually originated from China (see the works of Joseph Needham). Indeed, the few major inventions that had allowed Europe to travel throughout the entire world and spread terror were all of Chinese origins, as identified so well by such counterparts as Francis Bacon in such conceptions as "The Three Great Inventions" or "The Four Great Inventions".
Many facts regarding the history of Chinese inventions remain unpopularized today and even in the PRC, which no doubt has something to do with the century of exaggerated political turmoil that had severely compromised China's ability to keep a rigorous record of its own history. Examples include such historical facts as, during the Song Dynasty period some time in the 11th-century, hundreds of thousands of gunpowder-propelled missiles were manufactured, or, that matrix theory, along with the method of Chinese-Gaussian elimination, and such mathematical objects as the determinant, had originated over 2,000 years ago in China (see Roger Hart's "The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra"). Indeed, the Chinese-Gaussian elimination is one of the if not the most important algorithms that which had allowed the computer/information revolution today in the 21st-century, along such counterparts as algorithms providing the Fast Fourier transform or gradient descent.
I very much enjoyed this conversation but I couldn’t help but feel the sense that the China Dream is long since over and things have not been going well at all the last 5 years, with the future looking bleak
First!!
1:03:00
CIA would provide its agents with a new alias, new passport and background if it wanted to send its agents to China. There is a long established practice.
I think the issue of demographics is grossly misunderstood. It’s not really about accommodating the incoming retirees and taking care of them. It’s more about trying to maintain growth rates in your entire economy in the face of a shrinking workforce
@7:20 - on average of course but all brain surgeons did very well on their written tests
👍👍🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳👍👍
It's been an interesting to see Molson transition from a serpentza clone to a student of Xi Jinping Thought.
Cause he found out the truth that's why
@@inconvenientTruther was he a serpentza clone? that's incredible--no wonder he is blocked by some pro-CN accounts (Molson showed it)🤣🤣