It’s been almost ten years since I last set foot on the US soil. I can still remember taking the F train after work to the Japanese hibachi restaurant called Narita, where a decent dinner cost around $30 per person.

In May 2025, I spent two weeks in the US. I attended conferences on AI and business, and met old and new friends. I would like to share my little thoughts and observations.

 

Uber-capitalism

When I was waiting my Uber at the LA airport parking lot, I noticed a massive billboard at the exit. It says: “Body damage, Car Accident Lawyer – call 800-XXX-XXXX”.

I was surpised to see a small law firm spending such a large sum of advertising only for a nitch service.

My Uber driver, likely in his 40s or 50s, told me he had been driving for more than 10 years. All the way, he complained about the greedy Uber CEO, who cut a large portion of drivers’ benefit. Now a days, a Uber drive may earn less than $8k per month, while he could easily earn more than $12k per month four years ago. The income decreases and the cost of living increases.

I listened and nodded. But it wasn’t until I saw the Uber receipt for this trip that I truely understood.

The trip cost me $75. The driver only got $39. Apart from taxes of $5, there was a booking fee of $31. What is that?

The explanation note below says: “The Booking Fee is a variable fee that helps support Uber’s regulatory, safety, and operational costs, such as the government-mandated commercial auto insurance we maintain on behalf of TNC/rideshare drivers and payment card fees. Nationally, Uber’s insurance costs for rides have gone up by roughly 50% per trip over the past 3 years. At the root of the problem is personal-injury lawyers targeting the rideshare industry for unreasonably large payouts that benefit them, attracted by the arbitrarily high insurance requirements. ”

From my point of view, it demonstrated how the service inflation happened in the US over the past few years. For the same transportation service moving a passenger from the airport to the hotel, it used to cost $43 in the past, but now $75. The additional $31 is taken away by insurance companies and lawyers. I really cannot justify that the safy condition is way much better and it values that much.

It’s the coersion of the government, insurance company and law firms to create additional GDP out of nowhere.

 

AI ads

Here are the advertisement for AI products in the US. Photo taken at a bus station.

• Recraft
• 11ElevenLabs
• Stripe

 

Here are the adverstisement for AI product in China. Photos taken at Shenzhen Baoan Airport.

• China Mobile AI cloud
• Deepseek All-in-one machine

That really tells the differences of the best selling AI products in the US and in China.

 

Cryptocurrency becomes mainstream

In the US, people talked about crypto openly.

At Stripe Session, crypto was listed as one of the top three trends in 2025, alongside with AI and globalization. Stripe just aqcuired Bridge Network at the price of $1.1 billion and introduced stablecoins into the payment process. Using stablecoins instead of fiat money, developers in the US can collect payments from clients all around the world. Clients don’t have to go through exchanging local currencies to USD, nor do they need a credit card. It elimates traditional costly banking KYC procedures, and avoids charge-backs and refunds which are typical in credit card payment.

At the AI+crypto panel of the UChicago China Forum, entrepreneurs talk about how to use technology to reduce the cypto’s transaction cost.

It looks like people don’t see cypto as speculative tokens, but rather as tokens for transation. All these efforts, along with SEC’s acceptance of crypto into the capital market, are making crypto more mainstream.

I believe the reason behind that is not because the value of crypto is as real as gold. It’s rather because people tend to believe the value of fiat money is no more “real” than cryptos. As long as the U.S. Treasury can issue bonds arbitrarily to create fiat money, and as long as the government coersion can significanly impact the value of a service denominated in fiat money, the fiat money loses its preceived value and stability.