Jacob Cooke on 618, China’s Consumer Climate & What Tariffs Mean for Global Brands

Episode Description Alvin Wang Graylin is a Professor of AI and Tech Policy at the University of Washington, a fellow at the Asia Society and Stanford HAI, and the author of Our Next Reality. In Part 1 of this conversation, Alvin and Todd explore the big-picture questions around artificial intelligence: what AGI and ASI actually mean, whether AI will deliver a post-scarcity world or introduce new risks, and how AI is reshaping jobs and the global economy right now. Alvin then lays out his 'Great AI Reckoning' thesis — his prediction of a coming financial correction in the AI sector — and walks through the 'Five Reconnectings' he believes a crash could trigger. The conversation closes with his argument for 'raising' AI rather than simply deploying it.

David Fishman is a Principal at The Lantau Group, an Asia-Pacific energy consultancy based in Shanghai. He has spent his entire career advising investors, corporations, and governments on China's power sector: from coal and nuclear to solar, wind, and green power procurement. In this episode, David breaks down China's current energy mix and the forces driving its renewable energy boom, explains why China is simultaneously the world's largest clean energy builder and still expanding coal, and discusses how AI data center demand is reshaping grid planning. He shares his recent co-authored essay with Kaiser Kuo and gives his take on the geopolitical significance of the Medog Hydropower Plant. David also reflects on how China is occasionally misrepresented in Western media, and shares what's caught his eye lately on the ground in China.

In a special episode of The Negotiation, WPIC CEO Jacob Cooke sits down with Dr. Henry Wang, founder and president of the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), one of China's leading policy think tanks. The conversation takes place fresh off the Trump-Xi summit — a historic meeting that put AI governance, trade stability, and the future of the US-China relationship back at the centre of global attention. Dr. Wang is a former Counselor to China's State Council, a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and one of the most widely cited Chinese foreign policy voices in international media. In this episode, he gives his immediate read on the summit's outcomes, what they mean for the bilateral relationship, and where the US and China go from here. The conversation then turns to AI — the most consequential item on the bilateral agenda. Dr. Wang explains his call for a global no-first-use policy covering AI-enabled autonomous weapons, walks through his argument that the US AI capex boom carries risks that cooperation with China could help mitigate, and assesses what an effective US-China AI governance framework would actually look like in practice. He also breaks down China's AI advantages — not in frontier models, but in application scale, deployment infrastructure, and commercial reach — and what that means for international businesses operating in the region.

In Part 2 of his conversation with The Negotiation, Zak Dychtwald, founder and CEO of BridgeWorks Global, shifts from diagnosing the hidden tax on global business to addressing what it means for companies operating in or competing against China. Zak regularly briefs executives from Qualcomm, Microsoft, Google, and Walmart when they come through the region, and he shares the framework he uses with them: what to borrow from China's competitive environment, what to leverage, and what to prepare to defend against. He then turns to Chinese companies going global, and why their challenges differ from those of Western multinationals operating in China. The people problem facing Chinese companies as they expand is distinct and underappreciated — and it intersects directly with the global collaboration framework Zak laid out in Part 1. Zak closes with one of his most provocative arguments: today is likely the least competitive Chinese companies will ever be globally, and Western businesses operating in the region should take that seriously as they build their own strategy. He also shares what global companies most consistently get wrong after years of running the Global Collaboration Index — and what actually fixing it looks like.

Zak Dychtwald is the founder and CEO of BridgeWorks Global, a cross-geography collaboration lab based in Shanghai. He is the author of Young China: How the Restless Generation Will Change Their Country and the World, has lived in China for over a decade, and speaks Mandarin. His clients include Google, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Medtronic, Walmart, and Ant International. His work has appeared four times in Harvard Business Review, most recently in a piece on how highly effective global teams collaborate across cultures — now running as a feature in HBR Magazine. In Part 1, Zak makes the case that global teams don't break down on culture — they break down on operating design. He lays out a framework of seven elements that determine how well global teams work, split into friction amplifiers (time zones, language, country culture), which leaders can manage but never really change, and trust-and-alignment multipliers (HQ-region power dynamics, company culture, market knowledge, process), which they can redesign. Most leaders pour their energy into the first three and ignore the last four, where all the leverage actually sits. He introduces bridge people — the senior leaders and frontline operators whose real job is holding the seams of a global company together by translating context between headquarters and the market, absorbing the time-zone load, and moving decisions across language and hierarchy — and the global collaboration tax, what those people absorb on the company's behalf. He explains what happens when a crisis hits a team that has never designed for one, and where leaders should start when they recognise the problem in their own organisation.