Azeem Azhar

speaker

7,268 appearances 34 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 25 Mar

Azeem Azhar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 18 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.

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Azeem Azhar's Exponential View · Why China builds while America debates, with Dan Wang · 1 Oct 2025 podcast

You need energy to put up skyscrapers and to build sanitation systems and to light people's homes.

And so it becomes part of the mindset of people in the ruling elite, in the national and regional governments, within business, that you need that.

And I think when you track what's happened to the US and the US's attitude to energy until about two or three years ago,

I do think you get this angle of your loyally state emerging, right?

So in the 1970s with Ralph Nader and the growth of those types of regulations, emphasizing efficiency, which is a great thing to have, in a way, the response to oil shocks.

And then we find ourselves in this funny place by 1990, where for thousands,

30 years, the US doesn't increase its energy density per capita.

I mean, it's a really bold secular bet to make that after a million years of humans linking prosperity to energy use, you decide you don't need to do that.

It actually plays quite well to your analysis of the loyally state and the engineering state, because I do think that a lot of what gets in the way now of Americans building more energy is actually things that are ultimately dealt with by lawyers.

You know, it's kind of regulation and permitting.

Well, it's very true.

And I just think we should take a moment to think back to FDR and the New Deal because, of course, they did build the Hoover Dam, the Federal Highway Interstate System, the Grand Rural Electrification Projects, all built at that time.

that time, bringing a lot of Americans out of poverty, improving prosperity, and building long-lasting infrastructure.

So we know, we have evidence, proof, that it can be done culturally, historically, it has been done, and with great, great consequence as a result.

If we

Just come back to this question around that Chinese economy and AI.

You know, you raise this point that China has lots of, within its industries, has lots of really, really interesting data.

Data around manufacturing, data around materials, data around processes.

And I remember years ago reading one of your essays before Breakneck.

It was a great essay about process knowledge, this notion that the Chinese are really, really good at process knowledge.

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