Awais Hussain
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on the atlas — 2
- 2025 letter | Dan Wang62 savers
- Curius / Onboarding2667 savers
highlights — 50
However strange our new world will become, there will always be a class of people who want to engage with essays and books. Over the long term, writing might enjoy the fate of the opera and the symphony. People have been heralding the death of classical music for a century.
2025 letter | Dan WangThis letter that you’re reading will no longer be sent around a month from now, while my book can sit unread on shelves for years to gather dust.
2025 letter | Dan WangIt’s funny that PDFs sometimes circulate better than web-optimized pages; there’s something about strict formatting that establishes authority.
2025 letter | Dan WangBarnes & Noble is opening 60 new stores in 2026. A lot of the growth in the book trade is coming from romantasy and fairy smut, while the genre of nonfiction is in slight decline. That’s all good, I’m no snob. It’s pleasant to believe that a few decades from now, people might still hold physical books in their hands.
2025 letter | Dan WangIt was two platforms that moved a lot of my books: television and radio. People bought after seeing me on CNN or hearing me on NPR.
2025 letter | Dan WangAgain, who is listening to all these podcasts? I don’t much look at my book sales, but it doesn’t feel like podcasts move the needle. And a book might create a lot of social media buzz, with all the right people saying all the right things, but Twitter too doesn’t drive sales.
2025 letter | Dan WangOne day in October, I went on six podcasts. I haven’t counted the number of podcasts I’ve been on, but I think the number is north of 70. There’s a lot I don’t understand. Are so many people really listening to podcasts? What is the appeal of a video featuring two people with giant microphones in their faces? Do we really have to live in an oral culture world?
2025 letter | Dan WangHomebuilding in London has collapsed. Heathrow has been making plans to build a third runway for twenty years, which is now expected to cost $20 billion. Britain’s electrical network is in even worse disrepair than America’s. I am not sure if it is a geopolitical asset to be able to stiff-upper-lip one’s way through ineffectual government.
2025 letter | Dan WangAt least Californians are struggling over something mighty; I hope that Leeds will one day have a tram.
2025 letter | Dan WangI thought that California’s high-speed rail project was an embarrassment; then I learned about the Leeds tram network. First legislated in 1993, mass transit might not come to West Yorkshire until the late 2030s.
2025 letter | Dan WangThese notes are small delights for any author. A stranger but still charming event was to see the Blue Book Club. About 20 people gathered in Brooklyn this November to discuss Breakneck, but not before the hosts issued a light exam to make sure that the participants actually read the book.
2025 letter | Dan WangBut the longer I’m in California, the more easy I find it to be a sunny optimist. So I’m hopeful that the lovable nerds there will be able to present their own smiling optimism to the rest of the world.
2025 letter | Dan WangI wish that the tech world could learn to present broader cultural appeal. I hope that Silicon Valley could learn some of the humorousness of New York (or at least LA.) It’s unfortunate that any show or movie made about Silicon Valley is full of awkward nerds; by contrast, Hollywood reliably finds attractive leads when it makes movies about Wall Street.
2025 letter | Dan WangThere is a 21st century playbook for becoming an industrial power and China has written it. This playbook consists of infrastructure development, solicitation of foreign investment, industrial subsidies, and the creation of industrial ecosystems. I hope that the US will stop attributing all of China’s successes to stealing.
2025 letter | Dan WangI wonder whether we can accuse the California government of subverting the will of the people by making so little progress on its high-speed rail, which was approved by referendum in 2008; California rail authorities take more pride in creating jobs than doing the job.
2025 letter | Dan WangWhile the rich have access to concierge doctors and the world’s best healthcare, the United States cannot organize a pandemic response; it is bioprosperity for the individual and measles for the many.
2025 letter | Dan WangBut American problems seem more fixable to me than Chinese problems. That’s why I live here in the US. I made clear in my book that I am drawn to pluralism as well as a broader conception of human flourishing than one that could be delivered by the Communist Party.
2025 letter | Dan WangLack of action due to the expectation of long timelines is one of the sins of the lawyerly society.
2025 letter | Dan WangI believe that modern China is one of the most ahistorical nations in the world. The state and the education system may talk insistently about its thousands of years of continuous history. But no other society has also been so destructive of its own history. The physical past has been disfigured by the attention of the Red Guards and the inattention of urban bulldozers. The social past is contorted by outrageous textbooks, which implement enforced forgetting of major traumas. For tragedies too widely experienced in modern times to be censored — the Cultural Revolution, the one-child policy, Ze…
2025 letter | Dan WangOne advantage for the US and China is that both countries are at least interested in growth. You don’t have to convince the elites or the populace that growth is good or that entrepreneurs could be celebrated. Meanwhile in Europe, perhaps 15 percent of the electorate actively believes in degrowth.
2025 letter | Dan WangTrump forces questions that Europeans have no appetite to confront, proud as they are in being superior to both Americans and Chinese. I submit that Europeans ought to be more circumspect in their self-satisfaction. Chaos is only one election away. Right-populist parties are outpolling ruling incumbent parties pretty much everywhere, and it is as likely as not that Trumps with European characteristics will engulf the continent by the end of the decade.
2025 letter | Dan WangEurope is losing the two-front battle against the Chinese on manufacturing and the Americans on services.
2025 letter | Dan WangLondon has the house prices of California and the income levels of Mississippi.
2025 letter | Dan WangThere’s no doubt that quality of life in most European cities is superb, especially for what I care about: food, opera, walkable streets, access to nature. But a decade of low economic growth is biting. European prices and taxes can be so high while salaries can be so low.
2025 letter | Dan WangSo here’s a potential way that China succeeds. Beijing’s goal is to make nearly every important product in the world, while everyone else supplies its commodities and services. By making the country mostly self-sufficient, and by vigorously policing the outputs of LLMs and social media, Xi might hope to make China resilient. He is building Fortress China stone by stone in order to outlast the adversary.
2025 letter | Dan WangI want to be clear that though I expect China will overrun advanced technology industries, it won’t make the country a broad success. Over the past five years, it has been mired in disinflationary growth, where young people struggle to find a job and find a spouse. The political system is growing even more opaque, terrifying even the insiders.
2025 letter | Dan WangI sometimes hear that the US will save manufacturers through automation. The truth is that Chinese factories tend to be ahead on automation: that’s a big part of the reason that Chinese Tesla workers are more productive than California Tesla workers. China regularly installs as many robots as the rest of the world put together. They are also able to provide greater amounts of training data for AI. We have to be careful not to let automation, like superintelligence, become an excuse for magical thinking rather than doing the hard work of capacity building.
2025 letter | Dan WangBig Tech might enjoy the monopolistic success smiled upon by Peter Thiel, coming almost to genteel agreements not to tread too hard upon each other’s business lines. Chinese firms have to fight it out in a rough-and-tumble environment, expanding all the time into each other’s core businesses, taking Jeff “your margin is my opportunity” Bezos with seriousness.
2025 letter | Dan WangSecond, western elites keep citing the wrong reasons for China’s success. When members of Congress get around to acknowledging China’s tech advancements, they do not fail to attribute causes to either industrial subsidies (also known as cheating) or IP theft (that is, stealing). These are legitimate claims, but China’s advantages extend far beyond them.
2025 letter | Dan WangChina’s industrial ecosystem is leading the way in replacing combustion with electromagnetic processes. Everything is now drone, as the combination of cheaper batteries and better permanent magnets displaces the engine.
2025 letter | Dan WangIn 2021, Lei Jun vowed that the company he founded would break into the EV business. Four years later, Xiaomi started shipping cars to customers. Not only that, a Xiaomi EV set a speed record at the Nürburgring racetrack in Germany. Compare Xiaomi to Apple, which spent 10 years and $10 billion studying whether to enter the EV market before it pulled the plug. The world’s most advanced consumer product company could not match Xiaomi’s feat.
2025 letter | Dan WangI’ve had Silicon Valley friends tell me that they are planning a trip to China nearly every month this year. Silicon Valley respects and fears companies from only one other country. Game recognizes game, so to speak. Tech founders may begrudge China’s restrictions; and some companies have suffered directly from IP theft. But they also recognize that Chinese companies can move even faster than they do with their teams of motivated workers; and Chinese manufacturers are far ahead of US capabilities on anything involving physical production.
2025 letter | Dan WangSince the US is much more services-driven, Americans may be using AI to produce more powerpoints and lawsuits; China, by virtue of being the global manufacturer, has the option to scale up production of more electronics, more drones, and more munitions.
2025 letter | Dan WangChinese founders talk about AI mostly as a technology to be harnessed rather than a fickle power that might threaten all. Rather than building superintelligence, Chinese companies have been more interested in embedding AI into robots and manufacturing lines. Some researchers believe that this sort of embodied AI might present the real path towards superintelligence.
2025 letter | Dan WangIt’s never worth forgetting that at the dawn of the Cold War, the US deported Qian Xuesen, the CalTech professor who then built missile delivery systems for Beijing. Or these Chinese researchers expect life in Shanghai to be safer or more fun than in San Francisco. Or they miss mom. People move for all sorts of reasons, so I’m reluctant to believe that the US has a durable talent advantage.
2025 letter | Dan WangIf US labs achieve superintelligence, the Chinese labs are probably on a good footing to follow closely. Unless the DSA is decisive immediately, it’s not obvious that the US will have a monopoly on this technology, just as it could not keep it over the bomb.
2025 letter | Dan WangSan Francisco is more open, but when people move there, they stop thinking about the world at large. Tech folks may be the worst-traveled segment of American elites. People stop themselves from leaving in part because they can correctly claim to live in one of the most naturally beautiful corners of the world, in part because they feel they should not tear themselves away from inventing the future.
2025 letter | Dan WangWhen political winds shift, most people fall in line, most prominently this year as many tech voices embraced the right.
2025 letter | Dan WangIts movements are more herdlike, in which companies and startups chase one big technology at a time.
2025 letter | Dan WangPortfolio managers want to be right on average, but everyone is wrong three times a day before breakfast. So they relentlessly seek new information sources; consensus is rare, since there are always contrarians betting against the rest of the market. Tech cares less for dissent.
2025 letter | Dan WangThough San Francisco has produced so much wealth, it is a relative underperformer in the national culture. Indie movie theaters keep closing down while all sorts of retail and art institutions suffer from the crumminess of downtown.
2025 letter | Dan WangThe Bay Area has all sorts of autistic tendencies. Though Silicon Valley values the ability to move fast, the rest of society has paid more attention to instances in which tech wants to break things. It is not surprising that hardcore contingents on both the left and the right have developed hostility to most everything that emerges from Silicon Valley.
2025 letter | Dan WangTech titans more obsessively pursue a few ideas — as Elon Musk has on electric vehicles and space launches — rather than developing a robust model of the world.
2025 letter | Dan WangNarrowness of mind is something that makes me uneasy about the tech world. Effective altruists, for example, began with sound ideas like concern for animal welfare as well as cost-benefit analyses for charitable giving. But these solid premises have launched some of its members towards intellectual worlds very distant from moral intuitions that most people hold; they’ve also sent a few into jail.
2025 letter | Dan WangTech has organizations I think of as internal civic institutions that try to build community. They bring people together in San Francisco or retreats north of the city, bringing together young people to learn from older folks.
2025 letter | Dan WangIt adores the youth, especially those with technical skill and the ability to grind. Venture capitalists are chasing younger and younger founders: the median age of the latest Y Combinator cohort is only 24, down from 30 just three years ago.
2025 letter | Dan WangI believe that Silicon Valley possesses plenty of virtues. To start, it is the most meritocratic part of America. Tech is so open towards immigrants that it has driven populists into a froth of rage. It remains male-heavy and practices plenty of gatekeeping. But San Francisco better embodies an ethos of openness relative to the rest of the country.
2025 letter | Dan WangCoverage of Silicon Valley increasingly reminds me of coverage of China, where a legacy media reporter might parachute in, write a dispatch on something that looks deranged, and leave without moving past caricature.
2025 letter | Dan WangIn 2015, people were mostly working on consumer apps, cryptocurrencies, and some business software. Though it felt exciting, it looks in retrospect like a more innocent, even a more sedate, time. Today, AI dictates everything in San Francisco while the tech scene plays a much larger political role in the United States. I can’t get over how strange it all feels.
2025 letter | Dan WangStarting [at a young age] he’s read everything that he could find about business. The subject that interests him, he’s read newspapers, biographies, trade press.
Curius / Onboarding