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Yeah, buddy, happy Thursday morning. It's the Tropical MBA podcast. Today we're going to talk

sourcing in China, the Canton Fair, the expat

experience in China. And so there's only one guy to go to. It's Matt Koalik from highcappen.com.

Yeah, to come back down from Xinjiang and set Dan straight about China. There's too much smack

talk on this podcast about how bad it is. So you're definitely been our go-to guy over the years. Anybody who sends me an email, I always send them your way and you've been super helpful. You're going to post a lot of support documents and stuff that we can reference on this post, tropical MBA.com slash canton. We just finished the interview. I really enjoyed having a talk. I've never been to the fair.

So you gave me kind of like an inside look about what it feels like to go there, what the opportunities are. And you also gave us sort of a broader look into your life in China and what

you see is the entrepreneurial opportunities there. The country's such a huge part of the

world now and such a huge economic behemoth that people have so many kind of preconceived notions about it and how difficult it is. I think sometimes you're right and sometimes you're not, but it's an important place to know and get some knowledge about. Well, if you're curious about China or heading to the Canton Fair, I do hope you give a listen and I think you'll get a lot out of this one. Again, you can ask Matt questions or give us your feedback on this episode at

Tropicalmba.com slash canton.

So I want to start off by if you could set the scene of the Canton Fair for me, because I know you've been a bunch of times, I've never gone. And I know that entrepreneurs in our community, they go on like annual pilgrimages to this place. They see it as not only an opportunity to see friends and things, but as like a business opportunity. Like I'm going to go there and find new products or I'm going to improve my current ones. So can you set the scene? What is the Canton Fair and why do entrepreneurs see it as an opportunity? Well, I think the Canton Fair, you know, it kind of has this legendary status behind it. It's one of the oldest trade shows in the world right now. I think they've been doing this thing, you know, since the very beginning, the opening of China, really. And they used to call Guangzhou Canton.

They've been doing this thing. You know, since the very beginning, the opening of China, really. And they used to call Guangzhou Canton. They've been having this

trade show. And it used to be the only way you could source products from China, right? You

weren't allowed to go to the factory in Zhangmen or northern China. As a foreigner, you're only

permitted to go to this one trade show in Guangzhou and every factory

from China would send some representative there to show you what their community was manufacturing.

And this kind of goes back to the way that Chinese communism was organized, right? Everybody in

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