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

And it's not necessarily something that shows up in the patents or when you weigh the intellectual property of a nation.

How important really is process knowledge and why is Chinese industry so good at it?

But doesn't the arc of process knowledge within a society naturally reach a point where it starts to decay?

Because, you know, Chinese people, especially if they're coming into being a second generation, the bigger cities may not want to work for Foxconn and they may have other things to do.

There are other opportunities in the economy.

To what extent are we seeing a blip, maybe it's a couple of decades long, where people

China's process knowledge continues to grow before the economy moves on.

We've already seen manufacturing move to certain types, move to Cambodia and Vietnam, and the people themselves don't want to do it.

That is a cultural, like a deep, deep cultural trait.

I mean, when you walk around Tokyo or Kyoto, as I did earlier this year, you absolutely do notice behaviors that make sense when you think about the Issei shrine.

that you don't notice when you walk around other cities, cities in Europe, cities in the UK, cities in the US.

There's something about the deliberateness of the culture.

And cultures have these different attributes.

Can one really lift and replace culture?

America has been so successful with different attributes for the last 250 years.

And so I think the question is, could that happen?

Or do we need to end up relying on our old deus ex machina, which is, well, we'll have

AI systems that will somehow learn the process knowledge and that will reduce China's advantage on process knowledge and it will allow the US and Europe to embed this within AI systems.

You know, it struck me that things like the CHIPS Act and the IRA under the Biden administration were perhaps creating the policy space and the financial space for there to be more engineering in the US.

And then the new administration has obviously changed the shape of those policies.

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