Are GPUs being smuggled into China? Nvidia says no. But Steve Burke, editor in chief of Gamer Nexus, has traced out the entire smuggling chain in an epic three-hour YouTube documentary. Earlier this year, he also he filmed another masterpiece of independent journalism exploring the impact of tariffs on America’s gaming computer ecosystem.

In today’s conversation, we discuss…

• Steve’s investigative process, including how he found people in mainland China willing to speak on the record about black market GPUs,

• The magnitude of smuggling, weaknesses in enforcement, and crudeness of US restrictions,

• China’s role in manufacturing GPUs they aren’t allowed to buy,

• And what it takes to stand up to Nvidia as an independent journalist.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

As of August 21st, YouTube has removed the full documentary via DCMA.

Having watched the entire documentary, I can confirm this video had zero business getting struck. GamersNexus is working on getting the video back on YouTube, but you can watch it here in the meantime.

From Craigslist to Shenzhen

Jordan Schneider: Steve, you are a madman. What motivated you to try to trace the GPU smuggling supply chain from the US into China?

Steve Burke: Honestly, I saw a Reuters story a couple of years ago about the concept of a GPU black market, and that concept is dystopian, cyberpunk, and weird. It’s really compelling because you normally don’t think of something that was historically used for playing video games as being marketable on a black market. That’s what started it.

We sat in the background for a couple years, and then this year, with all the policy changes, it came up naturally. Plus, Nvidia almost seemed to be inviting a response with their whole “smuggling doesn’t happen and it’s a non-starter” stance.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, at one point they’re writing blog posts saying no one’s smuggling GPUs, while there are photos from the Hong Kong Police Department — DEA-style shots of captured CPUs instead of drugs, smuggled with fake pregnancy baby bumps or by packing the CPUs with live lobsters. It’s an interesting communication style that was so strident it attracted moths to the flame of incredibly ambitious YouTubers. How does one start reporting something like this?

Steve Burke: The concept of the story was simple — there are GPUs that are not permitted for sale into China by United States companies, but they’re getting there anyway. We wanted to find out how.

Our tariffs video introduced a new style where we flew around and spoke to people affected by the issue. Instead of writing the story around the information we gathered, we ran their discussions mostly unedited and learned a lot from it. We thought it would be great to go out to China and talk to people involved in GPU smuggling to see what they’d say.

I spent a lot of time looking for people to talk to, collecting research, and figuring out who the key players were. At some point, I decided we just had to pull the trigger and get on a plane.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting because there’s nothing illegal in China about bringing banned GPUs into the country — they’re not banned there. There’s this weird dynamic where these people aren’t criminals in the PRC. If they were, they probably wouldn’t be speaking to a Western journalist. You found this gray area where someone was buying RTX 4090s on Craigslist in the US and shipping them off by flying to Hong Kong and China. Connecting that full chain was really remarkable. Walk us through some of the steps.

Steve Burke: The hardest part of putting together a story where you’re relying on people to explain their part of the chain — and we wanted them to explain it themselves, not through me — was finding the first person.

We found Dr. Vinci Chow, who works at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was referenced in an old Reuters story, and I emailed him. From there, I was able to ask him about the steps involved. He couldn’t reveal his sources or supply chain for how he buys export-controlled GPUs, but he pointed us in the right direction to find people ourselves.

The first step was crawling through Alibaba listings. As stupid as that sounds, I typed in the names of banned GPUs into Alibaba, and they’re everywhere. I started messaging people, always telling them, “We want to make a video. I’ll buy a card if I have to, as long as you talk to me.” A lot of them responded with confusion, asking if I actually wanted to buy something or not. But we found a couple people who were game for it.

The two main sources we found were basically middlemen for these GPUs in China. Both of them wanted to be involved because they were curious about how Western media works — they wanted to see the process.

From there, the next step was taking it further. We had the user — Dr. Vinci Chow, who uses these GPUs — and someone representing the middlemen. What we really needed were the people supplying the middlemen, which would be the smugglers we found. We also needed anyone else in the chain who might be modifying cards or exchanging them in another middle process.

Basically, we broke down the supply chain into categories and needed to find one person for each category to follow a GPU from start to finish. That was the goal.

Jordan Schneider: There are a lot of fun, colorful personalities you met along the way. Why don’t you give some profiles? We start with the university professor who’s maybe the easiest to picture — he’s just teaching his students and has three or four A100s. Not an enormous national security risk, in my humble opinion, but you start upping the level of sketchy characters.

Steve Burke: First, it’s important to point out that at no point did I feel unsafe with any of these people. I was at an Asian grocery store a couple days after publishing this, and someone from China who was visiting ran up to me. The first thing he said was, “Oh my God, this seems so dangerous!” I think that’s the common conception, but we never felt unsafe with anybody.

They were all very interesting characters. The sketchiest guy would have been the person in the US from China who buys export-controlled devices from Americans through normal Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace sales. Then he gets them back to China to collect a profit. He was the only one where — I’m not versed in criminal law — but I’m pretty sure he was definitely breaking laws.

The middle people we worked with in China, who sit between the users and the smugglers, basically buy from people in the US. It was amusing talking to this one guy, Vincent. He’s basically a solo operator running a trading company. He doesn’t care about GPUs or any of the stuff he sells — he just knows it makes money. He can buy it, sell it, and make money.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah.

Steve Burke: He didn’t even know which cards were banned and which weren’t. In the video, he asked me, “Is the RTX 5090 banned or not?” I said it was banned, and he replied, “But you can just buy them on the market.” It was baffling to him — they’re right there, so how are they banned?

Jordan Schneider: Those visuals are incredible — you’re just in a room with walls of these GPUs.

One of the big takeaways for me is that yes, fentanyl is banned in America, but there’s still a lot of fentanyl in America. There are millions and millions of these GPUs made, so it’s not shocking that there’s some leakage. The fact that there are enough of these people out there for Steve to build a whole story around it — and as someone who has tried and failed for years to get mainland guests to come on shows with me in either English or Chinese — you have to imagine an enormous iceberg under this little thing you were able to capture on camera. What other indications did you get of the magnitude of this?

Steve Burke: One of the better examples was the repair shop. It’s just a repair shop that fixes video cards. They’re not formally involved in any black market — they’re not intentionally part of some illicit market. They just fix GPUs, and as part of that, they happen to fix export-controlled GPUs that are on what the US would consider a black market.

This was really interesting because it didn’t click for me until I got home and started editing. The repair shop owner talks about how he modifies these GPUs to increase memory capacity and make them more viable for AI users. What I picked up on was that it’s keeping export-controlled silicon in circulation.

Normally, the part that dies on a video card isn’t the silicon itself or the GPU — those are super resilient. It’s usually a MOSFET or a capacitor that costs three cents to replace. In the US, these types of shops that can modify memory are relatively uncommon. I don’t know of a single one, though there might be someone out there.

The point is that in China, if this silicon is export-controlled and there’s restricted flow into the country, you have these shops that can keep devices in service through no illicit intent of their own. They’re just repair shops making money. That’s really interesting because you can see how it prevents their supply from diminishing when devices go out of service due to something fixable breaking.

Jordan Schneider: Playing Nvidia rep hat here with some critiques — there are a handful of gaming PCs slightly above the thresholds, but the things folks are more worried about are accelerators and full racks. You have quotes from Jensen and David Sacks saying these things are really big and heavy — how could anyone smuggle them? What’s your take on that line?

Steve Burke: He said something about not being able to fit a Grace Blackwell system in your pocket. It was a brilliant misdirection for someone who doesn’t really understand the device he’s talking about, because there are a few problems with that.

First, you don’t need the device in China to use it — you can remote into it somewhere else. The problem with that approach is the data is remote, so processing is slow. If they have a lot of data and really need it on-premises, then you would still want to get it in country.

One of the companies we found and spoke to in Taiwan is basically a testing firm. What they do is bring devices on behalf of other companies, test them, clear or screen them, then forward them to the company that hired them to test the device. Maybe they’re testing a server rack or cooling solution to make sure it’s sufficient before forwarding it.

These types of companies can also work to forward export-controlled racks. The one Jensen was talking about in that video — yeah, you can’t fit it in your pocket, but you can fit it in a crate and ship it from Taiwan.

From what we saw, it happens. We weren’t allowed to film this part, but we were in a room where they had Grace Blackwell systems just sitting there. I asked, “Where are these going?” The response was, “China — there’s a company that hired us, and we’re sending them to China when we’re done testing.” He thought nothing of it, as if he wasn’t revealing some big secret.

Jordan Schneider: The stuff you got on camera was more small-scale operators, but it makes sense that this larger-scale smuggling is happening. This is a desirable product, after all.

The thing that’s different with fentanyl is that it’s illegal in America, so you have domestic law enforcement making it harder for gangs and cartels — they have to get creative, creating a cat-and-mouse game. But if the destination for the black market goods is outside the export-controlling country, and the rest of the world doesn’t care, then it’s much easier once this stuff leaves the US. Tens of billions of dollars of this product ships every year.

Particularly when we don’t have systematic tracking — there was this Reuters article that seemed like a deep state warning saying they put tracking devices on things, but you don’t really have systematic tracking. What I assume is happening is the DOJ is building a handful of cases against these smuggler people, not a systematic effort to track tens of billions of dollars.

Steve Burke: Especially because most of these devices are made in China. Almost all of them are manufactured there, so the DOJ isn’t at the end of the factory line putting trackers on products. It would have to be somewhere else — maybe at Nvidia’s warehouse or whoever handles their logistics locally.

It’s definitely possible, but I think a lot of this stuff isn’t distributed through a chain that would ever be intercepted by the DOJ. If a factory in China is assembling an accelerator and “oops,” this accelerator has a defect, it’s not going to America — it’s going in the bin. What happens after it gets in that bin is unclear.

In at least one instance, we found that with the university’s accelerators, it appeared that an accelerator with a defect was assembled from other components kept from other defective units or spares. It’s almost naive to think that every one of these devices has to go through an export flow through the US that would be trackable by the US or Nvidia. Stuff can just disappear.

Jordan Schneider: The packaging happens in China. What sort of level of involvement does China have in the process?

Steve Burke: The assembly process works this way — Nvidia designs the silicon (done all over the world, but they’re headquartered in California), and TSMC manufactures and fabricates the silicon in Taiwan. Then, Chinese companies manufacture — and sometimes engineer through contract — the cooling solutions, the PCB (printed circuit board), and source all the capacitors and voltage regulator components. Everything that makes one of these devices — pretty much everything — is sourced in China.

They bring it to a factory that assembles it on an assembly line, typically with automated machines called SMT lines (surface mount technology lines). These pick and place thousands of components down the line, with some manual assembly of the heat sink, and then it comes out the other side. They box it and ship it if it’s going to retail, or if it’s something going on a server, it’s simply shipped to the next location.

The assembly locations act as collection or aggregation points for everything else. The company that assembles the video card receives components from at least dozens of other factories. The company that puts that accelerator or video card into a server is itself receiving components from dozens of factories. They assemble it, and from there it should go out to whoever the customer is, which is often Nvidia.

Jordan Schneider: This needs to sink in for people. There are server racks which the US government — even the Trump administration — has decided are too powerful, too dual-use, too scary to give China access to. But we still need Chinese firms to make these things.

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Steve Burke: Yes, but they’re not allowed to have the thing that they make. It’s very interesting. I tried to drive this home in the video — it’s a black market from the US perspective. The people we spoke to in China see it as just the market.

The guy Vincent we spoke to in his small shop — we asked him, “Does China care? Does the Chinese government care?” His answer was essentially that it’s none of China’s business. They don’t have a reason to care about what he’s buying or that America thinks it should be export-controlled. As a small business owner, he doesn’t have any control over it anyway. If it’s on the market, he buys it. If someone wants it, he sells it. It’s really that simple.

Jordan Schneider: Then there’s the question of where Nvidia fits in all this. Clearly they’d like to sell as much as they can, but they also don’t want to literally break the law. I thought it was very funny that you had four or five different interviewees basically hit you with the same Chinese idiom.

Steve Burke: “Open one eye and close the other (睁一只眼闭一只眼).” Yeah, they all said that. The question I asked pretty much everyone was, “Does Nvidia know, and do you think they care to control it?” The answer was that they just turn a blind eye.

I do think there’s truth to that. Jensen’s on camera one day denying this is a thing, talking about how it’s a non-starter because some smugglers got arrested. But then you look at it — well, they made tens of millions of dollars, according to the DOJ, before they were arrested. Is it really a non-starter? That much money is a pretty good starter.

Jordan Schneider: That’s a pretty good starter, and these are the stupidest ones.

Steve Burke: Yes, these are the ones who got caught. Exactly.

Jordan Schneider: I just asked ChatGPT, and it said that Blackwells are mostly assembled outside of China. But the RTX 5000 series — are those the ones you’re referencing?

Steve Burke: We could talk about that. It depends on what they mean by assembly, because Blackwell includes RTX 5090s, which are assembled in China — a lot of them. A lot of Hopper is done in China. The GB — I’m not 100% sure where Grace Blackwell systems are all assembled, but I know for a fact that some of Nvidia’s largest partners for manufacturing and assembling the boards we’re talking about are in China. The RTX 5090s most certainly are.

Jordan Schneider: Gotcha. Just to close the loop on this — we had Chris Miller and Leonard Lerer on last week. Leonard was pounding the table on the idea that if we want this to happen and we’ve decided it’s okay for China to get GPUs, let’s keep doing the playbook we have now where you can have cloud access in Singapore and Malaysia. There’s a little lag, but you can train all your models. It’s easier to see if someone’s doing something sketchy if it’s happening in Malaysia versus in a data center in western China. If the world really goes to shit, it’s much easier to turn those off if they’re in another country than if they’re already in the PRC.

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9 days ago · 48 likes · Jordan Schneider

Steve Burke: It’s interesting where, with sufficient power, an open market leader also benefits from being the leader of a closed market or black market. If those in charge — Nvidia and the government — decide that access in Singapore, Malaysia, or wherever is safer because it can be toggled or monitored for military use, the interesting byproduct is that it’s creating or fueling this secondary market in China for these devices to be purchased locally.

The most interesting thing to me personally is that we cover this stuff as gaming hardware — DIY PCs that you build to play video games. That’s how it started. What stands out is that gaming users, when they look at content about the product, aren’t trying to figure out how much money they can make from it. They want to buy it and use it to play video games. They’re not making money.

The whole thing has shifted now with AI use cases being so in demand and everybody trying to make a buck off of it. The person at the other end of the product consumption pipeline is trying to figure out how much they can make on this and whether it’s sufficient for the thing they’re trying to use to make money — like an H100 with higher memory capacity.

From my perspective, it feels so much less innocent than where it started with Nvidia’s GPUs, which was about getting high frame rates in Quake or Counter-Strike.

Jordan Schneider: I remember literally talking to people in the White House over the past few years, and they’d say, “We’re not trying to screw over Chinese gamers here. This is not our intention.” But the past 30 years of what Nvidia has built is so odd and happenstance — the thing they’ve been developing happens to enable you to create God as well as render 3D environments.

We’re in this weird moment where the RTX 5090 is marketed and sold as a gaming card, and that is its primary use case. But if you take that technology and put a lot of them together, you can train AI models that can do lots of wonderful things — and also train your AI drone swarms on how to target Taiwanese Marines.

Steve Burke: That’s the other thing that’s interesting — the computing time. One of the points brought up by one of the two professors we spoke to was, “Okay, you’re forcing me to use a slower device, but it can still do it, so I’ll just wait another day or two for that processing.” From the perspective of the US Government, that is still somewhat of the impact they want. If you slow someone down to two days instead of one, that’s a big difference — a 100% increase in processing time.

At the same time, it’s interesting from our vantage point as a more technical outlet — the US government really doesn’t know how to control any of this. They don’t seem to understand how performance is calculated. They don’t use benchmarks that make any sense. If they were to contract someone making YouTube reviews from a bedroom, they might have a better formula for controlling these things.

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Instead, what we get is, “Well, let’s just take the FLOPS from the brochure and multiply it against the bit length of the operation or something and see if that works out.” It seems like they backwards-computed that formula until they restricted the ones they wanted, and then the formula broke when the next generation came out.

The US doesn’t seem to have put the right people on this or done it in the right way to think through the problem. As a technical reviewer, I look at it and wonder: why are we not benchmarking something that considers time to complete, memory capacity, memory bandwidth, and then maybe FLOPS at the end and clock speeds? For whatever reason, that’s not what the formula is.

It blows my mind that it seems so naive to not factor in these other specs on the spec sheet when judging performance, because every application is different.

Jordan Schneider: We should explain who you are and what Gamers Nexus is.

Steve Burke: Generally speaking, we do consumer hardware-facing product reviews and benchmarks — technical analysis of computer components to help people decide whether they should or shouldn’t buy something, whether it’s accurately represented, things like that. We also do consumer advocacy reporting. We’ll take stories about companies screwing over the little guy — warranty denials, things like that.

It’s an advocacy approach where we’ll take a case from a viewer who feels they’ve been wronged by a company, then we’ll take ownership of it and see it through to the end. We try to fix it while also figuring out what went wrong.

On YouTube, we have something like two and a half million subscribers. I started it in 2008 as a website — an article-driven website. Our core team currently has four members, with eight to nine people working on stuff daily.

Tariff Mania and 21st-Century Journalism

Jordan Schneider: All right, tariffs. What was the story you guys tried to tell with that documentary?

Steve Burke: The tariff story was fun because that was a three-hour documentary — our test case for this approach. We got to the GPU story because of the tariff story, where we thought, “All right, that formula worked, let’s try that again."

The way we got to the tariffs story was through conversations I’d already been having with hardware manufacturers who were warning me of price increases. They were trying to figure out how to convey this incoming increase to an audience that would be very upset about it. We were already having those conversations when what I believe was called “Liberation Day” — those tariffs came down.

That was the day I immediately started calling everybody I knew, dating back twelve years in the industry, to see if we could get them on camera to talk about this. Everybody was freaking out because this would potentially mean — in some cases — up to 170% tariffs. It was also starting to target other countries that companies had just started moving to in order to avoid tariffs.

The topic was hot, everybody was upset, and they were willing to go on camera. The problem they ran into was, “We’re going to have to skyrocket the prices on a computer case that should be $90, and customers are going to think we’re gouging them.” In some cases that may be true — that can also happen — but it was just the right moment to try and talk to everyone.

Jordan Schneider: There were two levels that made it such compelling content. First, you had Corsair, but it was mostly small to medium-sized businesses saying, “Oh, Steve’s coming. Let me share a spreadsheet of our future cost structure.” You had these very granular case studies of what the Liberation Day numbers would mean to these companies, as well as the emotional impact of all these conversations.

People forget that when you have a new tariff number, it means an enormous amount of stress on management thinking, “Oh shit, do we need to cancel this buildout? Do these SKUs need to die? Our entire business plan is thrown out the window.” Because this number went from 3% to 50%, down to 20%, up to 25% — and every single one of them repeatedly saying, “There’s absolutely no way I’m building a factory in America. I’m not embarking on a manufacturing renaissance of PCB boards or coolant or decals or whatever, because I’m just trying to stay alive. I’m not trying to plan for the future here."

Steve Burke: Most of these companies don’t own their own factories. Even if they wanted to make products here, that’s not their decision — they don’t have the capital, and the supply chain isn’t here.

Personally, as an individual endeavor, I can take a 3D rendering of a product idea to SEG Market (赛格电子市场) in Huaqiangbei in China, show it to a guy who prints PCBs and a guy who sells capacitors and MOSFETs, and probably have a sample within a couple of days. That doesn’t exist here. That’s a problem if you want to move the supply chain, because you can’t just bring over the end product — you have to bring over all the components that go into it to avoid these tariffs.

For some companies in the story, like Hyte (a small computer case and cooler company), they decided it was easier to halt shipments to the US and move all their advertising and product sales to Germany, England, and anywhere they wouldn’t get hit with these tariffs. They focused on those markets instead.

It ended up creating the opposite of the intended effect — now you’ve got a shortage of products in the US that people really want, and prices are going up due to low supply and tariff concerns.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting — it doesn’t really show up in inflation if the thing doesn’t exist anymore. That was really striking. In the interview, you asked if companies might die from tariffs:

Steve Burke: “Do you think this kills some American companies? Not necessarily anyone’s here at this table.”

Guest: “Oh yeah. This is a high-stress event. This will kill some people.”

Steve Burke: That’s a good point. Even for non-owners — just someone whose job is logistics for a company — if you’re responsible for millions, tens, or hundreds of millions of dollars of product and you’ve got the company breathing down your neck not to screw it up, that’s an enormous amount of stress for something they have very little control over. It comes down to decisions like “Do we take it off the boat or send it back to China?"

Jordan Schneider: Steve, watching you take these big swings and put out two of the most remarkable pieces of journalism I’ve seen this year has been fascinating. You have this deep domain expertise, decades of connections, and experience as a live player building things and seeing the industry evolve. What has the experience been like for you and your team to bite off these stories?

Steve Burke: First, it’s always weird coming off the back of these stories because we post something about black market GPUs and US export control in China, and then in a couple of days I’m going to post a review of a computer case.

One of my friends in the industry recently said to me at a trade show, “What are you doing running around the show floor talking about computer cases?” I still enjoy that stuff — it’s fun for me, easy, and interesting. But for the audience, the biggest thing we have to navigate is that the audience isn’t fully cohesive. It’s not one big mass. You’ve got people who really enjoy these stories and people who really don’t.

What we’ve been trying to do is focus one of our two channels on reviews content. Eventually, a lot of this reporting will probably move over to GN2, which is our consumer advocacy channel. The reason is that YouTube poses a big challenge: if someone subscribed because they enjoy these pieces — tariffs and geopolitical ones — but then they don’t click on anything reviewing a CPU because they don’t care or understand it, YouTube will mark that person as having become disengaged, even if they’re actually just waiting for the content they want.

We’ve been trying to allow the audience to choose if they want one or both types of coverage. That’s been an interesting journey. There’s this background battle people don’t consider — we’re also battling with the YouTube algorithm, which nobody understands. YouTube can’t tell me how it works. They don’t know. They built it and then it went off and became the Terminator.

For the team, it’s been fun because it’s a creative challenge. It’s interesting to talk to all these different experts and learn. At the end of the day, if we want a break from the travel and these stories, we just go review a computer part, and that’s still just as fun.

Jordan Schneider: How do you monetize something like this? It’s an enormous amount of effort to pull one of these together.

Steve Burke: This one was expensive. The travel alone, not counting staff costs, was maybe $15,000. We were overseas for three weeks with a lot of flying around.

For this particular story and most of our funding, it comes from audience support — things like Patreon or our own store where we make computer building products that people can use to help build PCs or other miscellaneous items. That’s the biggest component of our revenue.

Then there’s YouTube AdSense, which is pretty small — those third-party ads that everybody hates and hopefully can skip at the beginning of a video. Finally, there’s direct ad sales where we go to manufacturers directly and offer to sell them an ad for their product, though we didn’t put any of those in this video.

Jordan Schneider: Do you think other corners of your micro-niche are interested or have taken these other swings? How do other folks conceptualize speaking to bigger stories?

Steve Burke: Micro-niche is a good phrase for this. Because we’ve been so historically embedded in benchmarking components and testing video games, a lot of the people I know and respect are in that segment. A couple of the guys I’ll shout out — Hardware Unboxed does excellent benchmarks. He’s talked to me at shows, and the paraphrase of the conversation was more or less, “You can have those stories. I don’t want them.” Fair enough — if you enjoy what you do, then sure.

I don’t think a lot of the people I know directly want to do hardware component-oriented political coverage. No one really wanted to talk about politics in any capacity. I certainly didn’t. I’m on record in a lot of videos in the past saying we’re just reporting on this as hardware-relevant news and keeping all the politics out of this particular story.

As time has gone on and especially as companies like Nvidia have become more relevant to governments, I decided it’s not only not possible to fully separate it anymore — it starts to become almost irresponsible at some point to try to keep separating it because it’s integrated.

A lot of people are just happy to benchmark computer hardware news. This kind of coverage causes a lot of new stresses or problems because you’re potentially stepping on the toes of an audience that’s thinking, “I just watch you because you talk about computer cases. I don’t want to hear you talk about Donald Trump."

Jordan Schneider: The LeBron James “shut up and dribble” mentality. But let’s do a little Steve history — did you work for your high school newspaper? Where did this come from?

Steve Burke: I did. That’s funny, I forgot about that. I also distributed a — God, I was probably 10 or 12 or something — neighborhood newspaper that I wrote for my local area. I forgot about that too until right now.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting, the choice to do more political coverage and reporting. There are people like Tim Ferriss who comes to mind — a very popular person who just leaned out of any of this and lost national relevance. You see folks like Joe Rogan or All-In Pod getting much more into this, and the audience excitement and interest for these types of things increasing over time.

Watching the micro-niches I follow — yours and other sports-style coverage — it’s very bifurcated. There are people who have something in their past where they wrote for a high school newspaper and are just into this, and then there are other people who say, “Look, this is not my thing. I enjoy my niche. I don’t want the smoke that comes with it."

Steve Burke: It’s very uncomfortable to get into political stuff. For me, it’s one of those situations where we’ve got a story we think is interesting to everybody, regardless of politics, but we can’t separate it from politics. There’s a chance we piss off someone who we want to come back tomorrow and watch a computer case review. That’s uncomfortable.

It can also be uncomfortable because you’re making some of those people in the audience uncomfortable — maybe they’re confronted with these reviewers now having opinions they don’t agree with about things they don’t think we should talk about. There’s validity to that.

At the same time, I feel our job is to push buttons and be a thorn in the side of big companies. If that means making some people feel a little uncomfortable with this being different — “I don’t know if I enjoy it, but I’ll try it” — that’s kind of where we want to be. We’re saying, “It’s relevant enough. Hear us out. We’ve earned your trust so far. Just hear me out."

Jordan Schneider: There are a few levels to this. One is that you’re coming at this from a consumer advocacy perspective, and you’ve been getting into arguments with Nvidia about warranties and the Bitcoin GPU situation. Having the wherewithal to pick fights with trillion-dollar companies is step one.

From the audience perspective — and let me know if you think I’m practicing what I preach here — authenticity really helps. Look, I voted for Biden and I voted for Kamala. I don’t think anyone who listens to the show is surprised by that. But that’s not what defines this show. What defines this show is that I’m really curious about China and technology. I think this stuff is important and I want to explore these issues.

Coming at it from a place of investigation and curiosity as opposed to strict advocacy — you weren’t starting from the premise that “Trump’s an idiot, let’s use this tariff story to make him look really dumb.” Your premise was, “This is a really big deal for this industry that I cover. I want to show my audience and the world more broadly what these policies are doing to these businesses.” Through that, you had a really fascinating exploration. I’m not worried about you. You’re two for two right now, Steve. It’s going to be fine.

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Steve Burke: I appreciate it. It really helps to let the people you have on just speak. Going into it with the plan of “I’m just going to ask questions and see what they say, and that’s kind of it. I’m not going to push them on their beliefs. I’ll ask more questions maybe, but I don’t really care what this person does or doesn’t believe. I just want to know what they think.”

Then we put it together with all the other stuff people think, and the audience can decide who they agree with. That approach really helps defuse a lot of it, because then you’re just coming up with good topics and going from there.

Jordan Schneider: From my perspective, I do an interview show, not “Jordan talking for an hour.” It’s much more fun for me to learn as opposed to trying to argue with someone or convince them of something. Starting from a place of curiosity is generally a good thing.

By the way, there’s another media aspect worth processing that you mentioned with the government folks — it’s the same with mainstream media reporters. They’re not coming to this having been computer nerds since they were eight years old. They’re coming to this because they were assigned to it — they became a journalist and the Financial Times or Reuters or Wall Street Journal said, “You’re on this beat right now."

The level of connections, sophistication, and specific knowledge that you can bring to these stories is really rich in a way that mainstream media and reporting has a lot going for it, but deep subject matter expertise on the part of the reporters themselves sometimes happens but isn’t really the default. Specifically when you’re talking about stories that have such an industry technical component, being able to tell them through the eyes of someone who really knows their stuff adds another level of sophistication that really shows.

Steve Burke: I used to be worried that this would be a one-hit wonder type of thing — okay, it’s pretty narrow, I happen to overlap with this expertise, but does this happen again? I don’t know. But now, you look at it — Nvidia really is the best example. They are so intertwined with government and Intel now. The government’s talking about buying 10% of AMD, and they’re in the audience for some of these things.

It seems like this line is going to continue to be blurred between tech — especially big tech companies — and government regulation in ways that are still very strange to me. I know the people who are talking to Donald Trump. I’ve met a lot of them in these different briefings, and I know them because they told me how many frames per second their product gets in this video game. Now they’re talking to him about whether this thing should or shouldn’t be banned from another country. It’s very strange still.

Jordan Schneider: It’s such a wild arc. I’m going to refer folks back to the episode on the history of Nvidia I did with Doug O’Laughlin. He was making video cards for gamers — that was 95% of his business for decades. Then crypto gave them this big capital infusion. Jensen was a man with a dream, and it turned out he was right about parallelized computing. He made the best chips in the world, which were able to make GPT-3, and then we’re off to the races.

This is not baked in, and it’s fun for you and for the broader community of people who grew up reading PC Gamer every month, thinking “Oh man, this new chip is so crazy. Let’s see if I can steal money from my parents’ wallet to buy it at CompUSA.” Now this company is probably the most important company in the world.

Steve Burke: Yeah, it’s very bizarre.

Jordan Schneider: Steve, I hear you’ve got a follow-up.

Steve Burke: Yes. The only follow-up I’ve promised to the audience so far is that we will try to find literally anybody in government to interview about GPU export controls. I don’t care who it is, what their viewpoints are, or what state they’re from. We’re trying to find any politician or someone attached to politics — attorney general, whatever — to talk about GPU smuggling, GPU black markets, and export control. We want to understand more of that political viewpoint.

I don’t know who we’ll find. It’s not really the circle I run in.

Jordan Schneider: This seems like a Gamers Nexus–ChinaTalk collaboration opportunity.

Steve Burke: Sure.

Jordan Schneider: More to come on this front. I’m really glad to have you on this beat, Steve. It’s great to have new voices. This is a really important story that has flown under the radar — investors know about it, but this isn’t something your average American has any understanding of. But it’s a big deal, and there are a lot of changes happening. I trust you more than anyone else to tell this story.

Mood Music:

社交媒体上，除了吵吵闹闹，也能学到不少东西，尤其是人生经验，但得从遍地信息垃圾中，甄别出有价值的信息。

昨天上推特，看到一位推友发帖说：“学会说话， 张嘴就给人如沐春风的感觉。 相信我，你的生活不会差。做为一个中年人， 我现在觉得，这是我最需要学习的技能。”这是那位中年推友的话。我早就过了早年，仍然觉得这是个很难得的人生感悟。

我们从中国出来的人，很多“不会说话”，缺少说话的技能。大部分父母不教，学校也不教，各行各业，整个社会，到处是说话粗鲁，不知道怎么跟人交流的男男女女，老老少少。

另一位推友转发了那个帖子，并加上了一段评论，她说“我认同。华人，男性，理工科。中英文语言能力是个大问题，写，说，全有。连带情商，一张口就得罪人。可能是应试教育的副产品。以前是完全是靠学历支撑。现在不说没有用了，但是这几年都看到了，prompts在把人脑可及的流程不断侵蚀。在99.9%同等竞争上，学会说话有绝对的优势。”

看到这段转发的评论，我回应说：“AI时代，谁擅长communication，就是沟通、交流，谁就是赢家。这些年的很多热门技能会被淘汰，但人跟人、人跟机器，包括人跟AI，communication是关键，是永远不会过时的技能。可惜这是中国教育的短板，很多相当聪明的中国毕业生没有这种技能。”

那位转发的推友是理工科背景，但她专门谈到一些理工出身的同行，说他们“张口闭口就骂文科生”，连她自己也被骂过“文科生”。这种现象在网上比较多见，都是些匿名的键盘状元，从小一路做题做到大学毕业，可能还念过研究生、博士，但一出专业，头脑就不太好使了。

英语世界，有些博士自嘲，说博士这个词，就是Ph.D.，意思是Permanent Head Damage（“永久性大脑损伤”）。一些理工科做题家，没念过博士，只念完了本科，就提前患上了“Permanent Head Damage”综合症 。

一些理工科很有成就的朋友，在大学当教授的，在公司做研发的都有，大都读点历史、文学方面的书，很会跟人打交道，很会用家常话跟人交流，在网上，在现实中都很有人缘。从来没有听他们说过文科生如何如何。

文科生、理科生，都有高智商、高情商，性格也很阳光的学生，也都有只学到一点皮毛，就把自己放到鄙视链上端的二货。一般来说，一个人是不是有能力，是不是有智慧，跟他学的专业没有必然联系，但跟他的天赋、悟性、家庭教育，还有努力程度呈正相关。

有些学生本来挺聪明，被逼着做了十几年题，脑子就做坏了，上了大学，说话做事，给人夹头青年的感觉。他们不知道怎么跟人交流，不知道怎么跟人沟通，遇到不同思路，看到不同经验事实，就骂别人“文科生”。这暴露了他们缺乏交流能力，也暴露了他们的头脑僵化，精神世界相当于“理工科孔乙己”。

不知道怎么跟人沟通，是中国文科、理科毕业生的共同短板。这是一种社会技能缺陷。以前，这种缺陷，虽然会影响一个人的职场表现，但在多数情况下，不至于让一个人被彻底从职场淘汰。但AI正在改变这种状况。一个人的沟通能力，不再是锦上添花的加分项，而是成为一种必备的核心技能。

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Mick Ryan is a retired major general in the Australian army and author of three books — War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Great Power Competition and Conflict, White Sun War, which is a piece of fiction about a near-future Taiwan war, and The War for Ukraine: Strategy and Adaptation Under Fire. He also writes the excellent Substack, which has taught me a tremendous amount over the past few years. The way Mick synthesizes history and contemporary conflict makes it one of my few true must-read Substacks.

In today’s conversation, we discuss…

• Lessons from the history of warfare, and how to apply them to modern conflict,

• Why superweapons don’t win wars, and how the human dimension of war will shape military applications of AI,

• Why economic integration alone cannot prevent a US-China war,

• The role of deception and the limits of battlefield surveillance, with case studies in Ukraine and Afghanistan,

• Mick’s four filters for applying lessons from Ukraine to a Taiwan contingency, and the underappreciated role of Taiwanese public opinion in shaping CCP goals.

Thanks to the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology for sponsoring this podcast.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

Why Humans Win Wars

Jordan Schneider: We’re not passing up an opportunity to open a show with Andrew Marshall. You’re fond of the following quote from him:

The most important competition is not the technological competition. The most important goal is to be the best in the intellectual task of finding the most appropriate innovations in the concepts of operation and making organizational changes to fully exploit the technologies already available and those that will be available in the next decade or so.

Is that really the key to fighting and winning wars?

Mick Ryan: There’s only one real future of war, and that’s the human being. If you take the human out of it, it’s not war by definition. That quote really gets to the human aspects of competition and warfare. Regardless of how spectacular technology might be — and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a longbow, a tank, a B-29, an atomic bomb, or AI — it’s ultimately humans who develop those technologies and humans who employ them as part of a larger national warfighting system, not just a military system.

I think it’s a really important quote and really needs to continue driving how military and national security organizations think about absorbing and integrating new technologies into their capability.

Jordan Schneider: On the other side of the spectrum, you have a book like Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers. I thought it was interesting and almost ironic that he writes this book, Engineers of Victory, which contains these wonderful little jewels of chapters that goes into specific technological innovations and how they get deployed and scaled up to have operational and ultimately strategic impacts. But at the end of the day it was really the broader industrial weight of what the Allies could bring to bear that decided the war for the most part. If you zoom out on a century-by-century level, that’s definitely what he argues in Rise and Fall.

Why isn’t it just the GDP or correlation of how many factories you have that ends up deciding this stuff? What was Andrew Marshall actually getting at?

Mick Ryan: Well, I think they’re complementary ideas. I don’t think they exist in tension, because at the end of the day, in the wars he examined — and it’s a fabulous book — both sides had industrial capacity, but the one that’s able to leverage it cleverly is the one that wins.

In the Second World War, Germany started with massive industrial capacity, but it didn’t mobilize it until too late. It didn’t mobilize its national workforce very well by still having servants and people working in household roles well until the third or fourth year of the war. Ultimately, it was about decisions made by humans — politicians and industrial leaders — to cleverly apply, prioritize, and mobilize industrial resources that won them the war.

Yes, in the macro, it was industrial capacity that won, but it was those who most cleverly mobilized, applied, and prioritized their industrial capacity that won.

Jordan Schneider: Here’s a relevant quote from Paul Kennedy’s Victory at Sea:

“[I]t would be a very grave error to think that great contests are won solely by larger and larger forces moving inexorably toward victory, by global trends, or by sophisticated causation-chains. To be sure, if vast shifts occur in the economic substructure and productive forces (for example, if an entire American continent is mobilizing for war), and an overwhelming flood of ships, planes, and guns is being sent to the battlefields, then it is more than likely that the enemy’s battalions will be crushed; indeed, if victory did not follow, the historian would be hard-pressed to explain that. But the deficit in all deterministic explanations—the substructure alters, therefore the superstructure is changed—is that they lack human agency. The victor’s ships, planes, and guns need courageous men to steer them, insightful men to organize them, and clever men to give them superior battlefield performance.”

Mick Ryan: We thought the future of war was drones, and then Bakhmut happened. At the end of the day, there is no technology that fully replaces every other technology that’s gone before it. That just has never happened. Even the longbow, revolutionary as it was, didn’t replace every other technology that went before it.

War is what I call additive. It just adds layers of sedimentation of everything that’s gone before it, and the new technologies add something on top. Even in Ukraine, drones have not — and I’ll repeat this — they have not changed a whole lot of existing ideas and technologies. They’ve evolved some of them, certainly, but largely what drones have done is extended what military organizations have done, not totally changed them.

At the end of the day, on the ground, you have to fight and take ground. That has not changed. Drones help with that; they help with holding ground. But if you talk with any Ukrainian soldier, they will tell you drones alone are insufficient. There’s a whole lot of other things that are required. It’s the same in the land, in the air, and in the maritime domain.

Jordan Schneider: Mick, can you imagine a future where the longbow makes a comeback?

Mick Ryan: Yeah, World War IV, I think, to paraphrase Einstein — but I hope it doesn’t come to that.

Jordan Schneider: Low signature, very quiet, doesn’t emit anything. Come on, it’s gotta be something, right?

Mick Ryan: Well, you just never know. But I did recently attend the Chalke History Festival in England, and they did have someone there teaching all about the longbow and giving demonstrations of its efficiency.

Jordan Schneider: Speaking of human beings, another book which I’m going to credit you for turning me onto is On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, written by Norman Dixon. He was a Royal Engineer for ten years, then became a professional practicing psychologist, and ten years into that decided to write about all the poor decisions that British generals have made throughout history.

The book came out in 1976, but in the introduction, he has this great little riff where he writes about generals.

“The contemplation of what is involved in generalship may well, on occasion, suggest that incompetence is not absolutely inevitable — that anyone can do the job at all. This is particularly so when one considers that military decisions are often made under conditions of enormous stress, where actual noise, fatigue, lack of sleep, poor food, grinding responsibility add their quotas to the ever-present threat of total annihilation. Indeed, the foregoing analysis of generalship prompts the thought that it might be better to scrap generals and leave decision-making of war to computers.”

What reflections does that quote prompt for you in 2025?

Mick Ryan: I think he got it partially right, but it’s not the full story. That was his view, and notwithstanding the fact we’re both engineers, there’s also counter-evidence. If you read studies — for example, Aimée Fox’s Learning to Fight is a wonderful study of how the British Army became a learning organization during the First World War — you can imagine a universe or history where both exist at the same time.

Every military organization has rock stars and incompetents. He focused and chose to focus purely on the incompetents, but there are also many rock stars — brilliant people involved in planning, execution, and leadership of military affairs. You need to consider both in the same context.

Having war taken over by computers — “taken over” is the wrong term — but guided more by computers is already here. We’ve seen that since 1991 in the First Gulf War. But computers making key decisions about strategy and operations? We’re not there yet, and I don’t know whether we want to go there. I would be deeply concerned if we went that way.

However, short-term tactical engagement decisions have been made by computers in systems like close-in weapons systems and air defense systems for a very long time. The range of tactical decision-making by AI and computers will continue to be extended. But the big questions about war — whether to go to war, the key trajectory of war, whether to end a war — will remain human.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about the crawl up the command chain that autonomous decision-making could have. We’ve been doing targeting since the 1990s, but there’s an aspect that seems inevitable at a surface level: once systems get smart enough, you’re going to want them to take up more and more of at least the decision-making space.

Maybe there are things on the battlefield that humans can do that machines can’t, but this orchestration — if it is more effective and you have this competitive dynamic between two reasonably equally matched adversaries — if there’s an advantage there, someone’s going to lean into that, right?

Mick Ryan: Absolutely, and for the most part we’d be crazy not to. But there are still limits to seeking advantage. We’ve accepted that through the Biological and Chemical Weapons Convention, so it’s not a 100% free-for-all — it’s about a 90% free-for-all when it comes to weapons and the conduct of war. We’ve also signed up to things like the Geneva Convention.

Even though war is the most awful thing that can occur to human beings, we’ve still accepted that there must be some limitations on it. Now whether those limitations continue to hold is an open question. Russia has clearly decided that it will no longer abide by the Geneva Conventions. It has rarely done so in the war in Ukraine — it has executed POWs, tortured virtually every single POW it’s taken, deliberately murdered civilians, and used chemical weapons on the battlefield in hundreds of recorded incidents.

China will be learning from that, and we might surmise that they might decide it’s in their advantage not to abide by those rules. Whether the norms about limitations on warfare hold, or whether we find ourselves falling into total war — and I mean real total war — remains to be seen.

Jordan Schneider: You’ve seen this increasing digitization of command and control. Right now we’re in a very interesting, sticky moment on the front in Ukraine. At what point are we going to have AIs making recommendations which humans are going to follow because they trust the AIs more than their own intuition about how to deal with a front where there’s some tactical breakthrough? That’s an interesting one to ponder at least.

Mick Ryan: There’s a lot of talk about static front lines in Ukraine and how to break them, but they’re not truly static — they are moving. As we’ve seen throughout the course of the war, surprises are possible and you can do things that generate an advantage resulting in penetration and breakthrough, at least on the ground. We’ve seen that in the air as well.

This has not really been an air war — it’s been a drone war, but there hasn’t been a large-scale air war. The future of air warfare is probably more about what we saw Israel using against Iran than what we’ve seen in Ukraine. The same applies to maritime warfare — we haven’t seen a full-on maritime war. Ukraine offers us many lessons, but not in every single dimension and domain of warfare.

Jordan Schneider: I want to come back to human fallibility one more time. Maybe this was a theme in your novel — you kept emphasizing when people were tired. It seems clear to me that of all the things most legible for an AI to process and spit out recommendations for, these point-in-time decisions of “do we do A or B or C” seem to be on the multi-decadal timeline of things that are coming.

Before we’re going to have humanoid robots that can do everything infantry do, before we’re going to have robots make crazy material science breakthroughs, the types of things that someone in a command post or someone managing a battalion does — those decisions seem closer than AGI or what have you.

From another angle: what would you need to see from your war games or your interactions with some automated command and control system in order for you as a commanding officer to start handing more and more of the reins over — up from the super tactical stuff towards the more operational decisions?

Mick Ryan: We already see this happening in digital command and control platforms that the Ukrainians and many others are using. They offer very good situational awareness. Just the recall function alone — you don’t have to have people marking maps anymore. It’s automatically updated with friendly and enemy locations. That alone is an enormous step forward from many traditional ways of warfare.

The ability to understand the capacity of friendly units and those you’re opposing — their weapon ranges and holdings. The ability to quickly contact neighboring units in ways you may not have been able to do with radios in certain circumstances. Then there’s the ability to support planning and decision-making with data that you’ve either forgotten or wouldn’t traditionally access. The ability to quickly war-game lots of different options rather than having to do it manually when you’re tired, wet, hungry, and under threat.

These are the kinds of tactical functions that digitization and bespoke AI offer at the moment and will continue to improve. We’ve seen it really close the kill chain. Others are using it to work on what they call the “live chain” — casualty evacuation operations. AI is not just about improving the speed and capacity to kill people. It’s also improving the speed and capacity to treat, evacuate, and save people’s lives on the battlefield as well.

Learning from History

Jordan Schneider: Your most recent book is this extended meditation on what the war in Ukraine confirms about the nature of war broadly, as well as what disjunctures we may see today and tomorrow. I imagine there’s an aspect of this being surreal. The fact that we have now spent three years living through a high-intensity conflict that many people imagined was much more far-fetched than it turned out to be.

What has it been like following this halfway across the world, traveling there, traveling back, meditating on it, and living and breathing the conflict that we hoped wouldn’t happen in the 21st century?

Mick Ryan: The whole reason I wrote War Transformed is because these kinds of wars are inevitable. Humans are not smart enough to prevent war. I don’t care what any academic says about this issue — 5,000 years of history prove that humans are not beyond fighting each other yet. Unless there’s some change in the fundamental nature of humans, and there hasn’t been for a long time, we will, through calculation or miscalculation, continue to fight and kill each other. That was the core reason why I wrote War Transformed and how it might look in the future. Then nine days after that was published, Putin invaded Ukraine.

For me, the surprise was only about timing, not that it happened. Unfortunately, politicians and citizens still believe, or at least before 2022 believed, that this kind of thing was impossible — that conventional war wouldn’t take place because of economic integration. Well, once again, that’s a very old idea that’s been proven wrong in the lead-up to the First World War, even the US Civil War. If you look at that, the economic integration between the North and South was enormous, yet they still went to war.

Once again, there are all these fallacies that tend to become facts in the minds of many people about warfare. At the end of the day, you just need one person who miscalculates for us to fall into some massive conflagration. As I’ve written in White Sun War and elsewhere, that’s entirely possible in the Asia-Pacific. It’s very imaginable that America and China could find themselves at war regardless of any economic interest they have in not going to war.

It’s a little bit like climate change. The science is all there to say that things are clearly going to get worse over the course of this century, yet we still have politicians and people going on about how there’s no such thing as climate change, or it’s a made-up thing, or it’s a natural thing when all the science disproves that — and we’ve failed to act. Ultimately, humans are pretty good at ignoring facts and data if it’s in their economic or ideological interests. Because of that, we’ll continue to do things like go to war, just as we have in Ukraine and just as we may in other places in the future.

Jordan Schneider: Do you want to do a US Civil War detour? Do we have lessons from that conflict for Ukraine or Taiwan?

Mick Ryan: Well, every war has lessons. Many of the lessons from the US Civil War apply to Ukraine. There are lessons about mobilizing industrial production — clearly the North was able to mobilize its industry. It had more industry to start with, but it was able to mobilize it. It was clearly able to look at new technologies and absorb them into the military: telegraph, steam train, steamboats along the coast and along the Mississippi. There are lessons there about integration of new technologies, particularly at the operational and strategic level.

There are good lessons about civil-military relations. Both the North and South had issues with this, but there are some amazing and wonderful case studies about the interaction between Lincoln and the commanding generals of the Northern armies throughout the war, and then the relationship he had with Grant, which found its right level. Then there are great lessons about keeping citizens informed about good national strategy.

All these lessons from the Civil War — and there are great lessons about training, leadership, and these kinds of things as well — are every bit as applicable today, notwithstanding the different technological era, because these are human things. The human element of war is its enduring part, which Clausewitz wrote and is yet to be disproven.

Jordan Schneider: Another thing you point out in War Transformed is this idea of the future shock moment of the 1900s and 1910s being perhaps the one most applicable to today, just in terms of all this new stuff making your head spin perspective. If you could go back and be a war correspondent or work on a general staff, is that the time period you’re picking to get a better sense of, or are there others on your time travel list that you’d be excited about? Cholera notwithstanding.

Mick Ryan: It was an interesting period because the Second Industrial Revolution threw up all these new technologies that really disrupted the conduct of warfare in all the domains. There was a lot of thinking before the First World War about how these might impact. There was a lot of fiction written — hundreds of books literally sought to understand the impact of these new technologies on strategic competition and warfare. Lawrence Freedman has actually written a tremendous book that looks at this, but I look at it in War Transformed as well. Fiction has been a very powerful way of looking at the future of war.

I think that’s a very important period. Philipp Blom’s book, The Vertigo Years, looks at each year in the fifteen years that led up to the beginning of World War I, and looks at societal, technological, and industrial issues that emerged and how the world in 1914 ceased to exist by 1918. We could lay that over the top of 2022 and 2025. The world that existed in 2022 doesn’t exist anymore. The security architecture of Europe doesn’t exist like it did three years ago. The security situation in the Pacific doesn’t exist like it did three years ago. There are lots of parallels there, lots of rhymes, as Mark Twain might tell us.

I think that’s a really important period for study, probably one of the most important periods to study. But there are lots of other periods of human history that are equally worthy of study, from the ancient Greeks and the Peloponnesian War to Rome’s rise, its heyday, and its eventual fall. All of these offer profound insights into how humans think about governance, about war, and about competing with their adversaries.

Jordan Schneider: If you could spend one year as a fly on the wall in which bureaucracy over the course of the past 300 years, do you have a top three?

Mick Ryan: The first one for me would be 1939 in the Australian military, to see how they worked with government to industrialize and prepare for the Second World War. Probably the next one would be 1942 in the same place, to look at how the entry of Japan into the war fundamentally shifted everything. Those two periods for me would be really interesting.

Then probably the United States in 1940-41. There’s a lot of great literature on that period, but just to see how the United States planned to mobilize for the Second World War — the strategic and political decision-making that was involved and the political leadership that was required by the President to drag the American people into an understanding that they couldn’t avoid this forever. That was very interesting and very relevant to the contemporary world.

Jordan Schneider: Maybe that’s a good transition to talk about how the strategic level often completely wipes out whatever creative stuff you could do at the tactical or operational level. It’s the way you avoid wars in the first place. We’ve seen a lot — your most recent book on Ukraine as well as the subsequent year have cataloged an enormous amount of creative and awe-inspiringly horrific strategic decisions. What have the past few years made you reflect upon most about how the strategic level relates to other levels of war?

Mick Ryan: First, I’d start with the Russian side of things. Before he decided on this invasion, Putin had a series of strategic assumptions. This speaks to the importance of getting your assumptions as right as possible. At the start of the war, he had three big assumptions.

1. That the Ukrainian government would run away and he could insert his own government,

2. That the Ukrainian military was analogous to the 2014 military and wouldn’t last very long,

3. That NATO would act like it had for the preceding ten years over Russia’s invasion and illegal takeover of Crimea and parts of the Donbas.

He got all of those assumptions wrong, and we’re still in this war because he got those assumptions wrong.

From a European perspective, they assumed that they could continue being economically integrated with Russia and that would condition their behavior towards its neighbors. Very much the old Norman Angell “won’t go to war because we’re economically integrated” model. Once again, Russia proved Europe wrong and that it wasn’t a reliable energy provider.

The US Administrations made some assumptions about Ukrainian capacity up front. They didn’t think they’d last very long. The Ukrainians proved them wrong, thank goodness. They made assumptions about how much risk they were willing to assume in dealing with Russia in the first year. Because of the risk aversion in the Biden administration in the first year of the war and the very slow pace at which they made decisions about support — I remember when towed artillery was considered escalatory — well, it’s impossible to escalate when you provide a piece of equipment to a friend that’s being used against them the whole time. The Russians used everything in their inventory against the Ukrainians, so none of this was escalatory. But it was used by the peaceniks and the risk-averse in the Biden administration to slow down aid.

It manifested in the Ukrainians not being able to exploit the defeat of the Russians at the end of 2022. The great strategic lesson from the end of 2022 is: if you have your boot on the neck of your enemy, don’t take the boot off. That’s what happened at the end of 2022 with European and American decision-making in this war.

Surprise, Deception, and Taiwan Tripwires

Jordan Schneider: Let’s turn to Taiwan for a bit. Obviously you’ve been thinking about what is and isn’t applicable from the past three years and have a new piece coming out in the next few weeks. What’s the right framework to start taking and applying lessons?

Mick Ryan: The first thing is to understand what China wants. What does the CCP want? What does Xi want? That’s the start for any investigation of Taiwan. If you don’t understand that — if you haven’t read all of Xi’s speeches over his term as president and chief of the Chinese Communist Party and head of the Chinese Military Commission and every other appointment he’s got — you don’t understand the overall situation. That’s a good starting point.

Then you need to understand the aspirations of Taiwan and look at different literature that relates to that — the speeches by this president and his predecessors over many years, and how the Taiwanese democracy has developed. The polls that look at Taiwanese views of themselves — are they Chinese, are they Taiwanese? These are the necessary foundation for any exploration of the ongoing tension and competition between Taiwan and China.

Then of course, you need to understand regional dynamics. There’s no regional NATO. There are some alliances that are very important, and INDOPACOM in Hawaii is central to all those. Those are the essential ingredients of any understanding of the situation in the western Pacific.

Then it’s just about continuously tracking Chinese military aggression and where countries are pushing back against that, and the level of deterrence that might be achieved against a Chinese Communist Party that is hell-bent on taking Taiwan — on unifying it with China. You have an aging Chinese leader who’s looking at his legacy. He is looking at how does he get himself a fourth term in office. All these things come together in the second half of the 2020s in ways that don’t augur well if we’re not decisive and determined in standing up for not just Taiwan, but all democracies in the western Pacific and pushing back against coercion, subversion, and aggression.

Jordan Schneider: You lay out this framework of four filters for interpreting what you’re seeing in Ukraine and applying it to Taiwan. You have geography/distance, terrain/vegetation (underappreciated), weather, and political environment/adversary capabilities. Pick your two favorites.

Mick Ryan: The first one is always you’ve got to focus on the enemy, and you can never take your eye off the adversary. That one is very important in the Pacific region because, unlike Europe, where they’ve only got to deal with Russia, in the Pacific, they’ve got to deal with China, North Korea, and Russia. You’ve got three very different but connected adversaries that have formed a learning and adaptation bloc — not an alliance, but a series of interactions where they’re learning from each other in a way that they haven’t done before, more quickly and more substantively.

You also have a significant potential adversary in China who’s bigger, richer, and more technologically advanced than any other adversary that Western democracies have ever come up against. Ultimately, this is an ideological war. You have two very different ideologies rubbing up against each other, potentially causing even more conflict and war down the track. We need to understand the dimensions of that ideological conflict. Is there room for agreement or accommodation, or will it eventually and ultimately lead to some kind of showdown over who is the top dog in the world? That’s the really scary part of a future conflict. If it does occur between the US and China, it will be about who is number one in the world. Traditionally, the number one doesn’t like to give up that spot, and they can fight pretty hard and ruthlessly. We need to understand that dimension.

My other favorite is terrain and vegetation, primarily because so many people think Pacific war is a maritime war. That is not the full truth. It’s partially the truth because yes, there’s lots of water, but a lot of that water is just in parts of the Pacific that we’ll be traveling or fighting through, not fighting for. There’s nothing in the middle of the Pacific worth fighting for. It’s an area you go through, not an area you go to. The western Pacific is where the real competition is, and that’s a mix of air, land, sea, space, and cyber conditions. There are lots of green bits where there is potential to fight. Those green bits might be jungle, those green bits might be cities. But we really need to understand them because that’s where people are and, importantly, that’s where the politicians are that ultimately make the big decisions about war and about ending war — who need to be influenced.

I emphasize that because we absolutely have to push back on this being a naval war or a maritime war. It’s a multi-domain war. The area of decision will be that strip of land within 1,000 kilometers of the Eurasian heartland that runs from Vladivostok to Tasmania.

Jordan Schneider: Foreign tripwires in Taiwan feature prominently in your novel. Where are you today on the idea of sending bodies in harm’s way as a way to signal commitment to Taiwan?

Mick Ryan: I think it’s still the way we do business. You’ve seen a step-up in foreign assistance to Taiwan even though not all of it will be declared. But it is a way of signaling that you are taking a big risk of targeting Taiwan because if you hit these people of ours, regardless of which country they’re from, you will have to answer to us. That’s still a valid theory. It can be dangerous and it can be provocative at times, but it’s also a good way of signaling will and your determination to support friends and security partners and indeed allies.

America has forward-based ever since the end of the Second World War. It’s done it in Europe as a statement of commitment and will and as part of its signaling to an adversary that if you invade West Germany, you’re not just coming up against us, you’re coming up against an entire alliance. The United States has done it in Japan since the end of the Second World War to signal other countries, whether it’s North Korea or Russia or others, the same kinds of things it did in Europe. Forward basing by America and others is still a valid part of national strategy and probably will be for some time to come.

Jordan Schneider: This idea of surprise is somehow still underappreciated, even though we’ve had a number of wild surprises just over the past three years. What is that? People just get too confident? Why is pricing in the idea that you can be surprised such a hard thing?

Mick Ryan: There are lots of reasons for this. Lack of humility is a really important contributor to this. A lack of understanding of the enemy is another one. If you look at 1941, most Western allies really discounted the capacity of the Japanese to fight. They said, “Well yes, they’ve been fighting the Chinese for X years, but when they fight us it’ll be totally different.” It wasn’t. The Japanese achieved massive surprise and were able to launch this six-month offensive that spread out across the Pacific.

You see that kind of arrogance in Western military organizations today. You’ve seen many, particularly in the first eighteen months of the war in Ukraine, going, “Yeah, well, I don’t think there are lessons for us because it’s different and we’re far smarter.” We should call bullshit on those assumptions. Never underestimate the enemy because they will surprise you and they will hurt you. Once again, we have 5,000 years of case law to support that case. Humans have not changed.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the transparent battlefield. That is a fallacious view. It’s wrong — it’s not transparent. It’s highly visible, there’s no doubt about that, and better visible than ever before. But that hasn’t stopped Ukraine and Russia from surprising each other, even down to this latest twenty-kilometer penetration of the Ukrainian front line just to the north of Pokrovsk. There have been lots of examples of surprise in this war in what was supposed to be a transparent battlefield.

I served in Afghanistan, and up until Ukraine, Afghanistan was the most densely surveilled battle space in the history of human warfare. We were still surprised regularly. This notion of transparency is a terrible fallacy. It’s one we should not encourage because humans are still able to deceive. This was a subject I wrote about with Peter Singer, and we published a detailed report through an American think tank in June this year. This will continue into the future and indeed may get more sophisticated because AI will help us not just with seeing more, but it will help us with deceiving more. You’re going to have this constant perception battle in warfare.

Jordan Schneider: The way the Pentagon talked about how they bombed Iran and how proud they were about sending some bombers to Guam so people looked left and then the bombers went right made me really pessimistic about the ability of the US military to do this. If they really feel like they have to wiggle their tail feathers around something this simple, I’m worried we don’t have too many more moves up our sleeve.

But maybe a broader question: at the conclusion of your novel — no spoilers — there is a super weapon that gets unveiled. I’m curious because at other points in time, and one of the big lessons of the Ukraine war is the fact that there isn’t really one thing that you can cook up at home that is going to drastically change everything for you. What was your thinking behind concluding your book with something that was cooked up under a mountain that has this big strategic effect?

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Mick Ryan: Just on the deception for Operation Midnight Hammer, I would add that it worked. At the end of the day, it might have been a simple deception measure, but it worked.

Jordan Schneider: Did it, though? I don’t know. Plenty of people on Polymarket were predicting military action the day before the bombing.

Mick Ryan: But that’s different from projecting exactly how that’s going to happen. The deception measure worked. You saw huge commentary around those bombers that headed over to the west, and no one picked up that this was being done another way. We probably need to give them some credit there — it actually worked and every aircraft got in and out safely. That’s a great achievement. Even if the Israelis had taken down most of the air defense network, that’s still significant.

The ending of the book wasn’t just about the super weapon. There were five different elements — it was just one of the elements. The message there was yes, we are still going to develop exquisite technologies, but there was a whole range of things, including cyber operations, ground warfare, aerial warfare, drones, and other systems that all added up to that culminating point. Super weapons don’t win wars, but they’re going to be part of our desire to help end wars in the future.

Jordan Schneider: I asked Jeff Alstott at RAND, who spent time at ARPA, point blank on the mic whether or not he’s been working on weather manipulation. He gave me a very confident no, but maybe he’s just deceiving us, setting us up for that big reveal one day.

Mick Ryan: Once again, it wasn’t so much about manipulating the weather. You can’t do that, but you can manipulate how people see the weather and give them a different picture that’s not the same as reality. That’s a simpler undertaking, as complex as that might be.

Jordan Schneider: This idea of mobilizing intellectual capacity is a really powerful idea and an interesting one to think of as a civilian, as someone who just sits at home and writes stuff. What is the right way for folks in the broader commentary and think tank community to try to do work that plugs in to help answer some of these big intellectual challenges and questions that Andrew Marshall posed at the beginning of the show?

Mick Ryan: The first thing is you can’t just study one war. You can’t study Ukraine and think you understand war. If you study Ukraine, you understand the Ukraine war and nothing else. You need as a foundation the study of war — its past, present, and future. Then you look at the Middle East, Ukraine, and others as case studies that either prove or disprove hypotheses about the trajectory of warfare.

Ukraine, I’ll be very clear, is not the future of war. It is not the future, but many elements that have emerged from the war in Ukraine will influence all future wars. We should remember that many of the lessons from Ukraine — probably 90% — are not new lessons. They’re lessons relearned about the importance of leadership, industrialization, organization, training, and these kinds of things. It’s reinforced old lessons rather than introduced new things. Now there are some new things, whether it’s the use of drones and similar technologies, but we cannot afford to see Ukraine as the future of war. But it will be very influential on all forms of future war.

I know that’s a fine line, but it’s a very important point to makeou have to study war in all its dimensions, not just the war in one place at one time, to really understand the trajectory of warfare.

Self-Improvement and Recommended Reading

Jordan Schneider: I’m going to link your posts with syllabi of dozens of books that people can dive into. But maybe I’m curious, Mick — there’s a lot in the Bay Area and also in Washington of this idea of AI as this millenarian solution that’s going to answer all the questions. I’m curious if there are a handful of books that come to mind that are maybe starting points for folks who haven’t already read fifteen books of military history to give folks a sense of just how messy the introduction of new technology to warfare ends up playing out in practice.

Mick Ryan: Some of the material about the interwar period — the debate about tanks and cavalry, the debate about battleships versus aircraft carriers — those were important debates about old and new technology and their potential impact on war. Institutions had to make some pretty big bets before war about these technologies in the hope that they were right, because ultimately you don’t know whether you’re right until you actually go to war.

Those past debates on new technologies offer some really important insights into how individuals and institutions respond and debate the impact and absorption ability of organizations for these new technologies, how they influence the development of entirely new organizations. In 1900, there was no such thing as an air force — it didn’t exist. In 2000, there was no such thing as a space force — it didn’t exist.

There are lots of historical analogies because ultimately the technology doesn’t matter. It’s how humans react to the technology. It’s how humans debate its impact, how humans develop the organizational and conceptual constructs within which those technologies will be used that are the most vital part. There are lots of examples of that over the last hundred years that can inform current debates over AI, over quantum technology, over future space and cyber capabilities.

I wish more of the technologists would read these examples, because there are too many people who are purely focused on the technology and don’t understand the foundational ideas behind war and human conflict that will ultimately decide how these things might be used.

Jordan Schneider: Great. Let’s throw them some titles. Where should we start them?

Mick Ryan: There’s a huge amount in there. I really loved Aimée Fox’s book Learning to Fight, which is about the British Army in the First World War, and how an organization learns how to learn better. It really challenges some existing paradigms about stupid British generals in the First World War — they weren’t all stupid because at the end of the day they won. Now, they didn’t do it by themselves — there were lots of other countries that helped — but part of winning was learning how to learn better.

Murray and Millett’s book Military Innovation in the Interwar Period is important, but also their three-part series on military effectiveness in World War I, the interwar period, and World War II across multiple countries provides a really good analytical framework and a good study of how institutions have learned and adapted across three different domains that were the principal concerns in those wars.

Trent Hone’s book Learning War is absolutely fabulous about how the US Navy developed a learning culture in the lead-up to the Second World War. Not perfect, but good enough to win, because war is not about being perfect — it’s about being better than the other person. Those are probably a good start.

There’s a recent book I’ve been reading, Brent Sterling’s Other People’s Wars, about how the US learns from foreign wars and how it has learned and adapted, or not learned and adapted, based on those. Dima Adamsky’s work on military innovation is extraordinarily important. Finally, Meir Finkel’s two books are terrific — On Flexibility and Military Agility. Military Agility is very important because it’s one of the few books that looks at adaptation not in war, not in peace, but the third really important part of adaptation, which is adapting from peace to war and how institutions and individuals need to do that.

I’ve covered this in a new report that’ll come out in September for the Special Competitive Studies Project, so watch for that one. But that’s a selection of very useful books. There are many, many others out there. I probably need to update my recommended adaptation reading list. I might do that in the next couple of weeks to include the full gamut of books. But that’s a pretty good start for anyone who’s interested in this topic.

Jordan Schneider: Awesome. I’ll throw in two more. Andrew Krepinevich’s The Origins of Victory — these are chapter-length pieces that aren’t really anecdotes but almost feel reported — they have characters in them and they develop over time. You really get the sense of, “Oh wow, it’s 1931, planes are just starting to be a thing — can we land them on boats? Not sure yet. Maybe if we make longer boats it’ll be easier.” It shows all of the little iterations you need to get to Midway. It shows the kind of personalities that you need to have in these systems in order to feel your way through the darkness.

I also recommend The Wizard War by R.V. Jones. It’s written by an engineer, it’s a memoir, it’s got a lot of color and characters, and does a really good job of illustrating just how dynamic these technological competitions can be where you have engineers on both sides trying to outdo each other. Something that maybe worked for you in January will be obsolete by April and actually might get you killed. That kind of dance that you saw in the Battle of the Beams and all of this other crazy electronic signals stuff that happened over the course of World War II — where a 27-year-old was able to do incredible things because physics was cool at the time — makes for some fantastic summer reading.

Mick Ryan: No, I agree. I’ll just throw in one final book there: a terrific book called Mars Adapting by Frank Hoffman. He looks at just how do you build an institution that is adaptive, that is learning and is able to adapt. He has a whole lot of case studies, but importantly offers a really important four-part model for how do you build this institutional learning capacity. It’s a really important contribution to this literature.

Jordan Schneider: Mick, how are you trying to improve?

Mick Ryan: I’m constantly trying to improve. Obviously I read a lot. My reading, my writing, my interaction with a bunch of different people is important. But also, I’m completing a PhD in creative writing to learn how to write better, to communicate better, because there’s always room for improvement.

But ultimately, if you want to develop what I’ve called this intellectual edge, you need to have humility. You need to understand that you don’t know everything, and that’s the starting point for all learning. Humility is vital, and we’ve all had to be pretty humble over the last four years with the Ukraine war. We’ve had to learn new things, had to relearn some old things. There are fortunately a lot of people out there who do possess that humility and have demonstrated the capacity to learn new things and recontextualize some elements of warfare. That’s an important part of learning.

Jordan Schneider: Do you want to assign me and maybe the audience some paper topics? Where have you not seen coverage to the degree there should be?

Mick Ryan: One of the reasons I’ve focused on adaptation is we need to focus more on how organizations learn how to learn better. That’s a core macro skill for every organization. This is a topic I’ll cover in my September report, which will be released at a conference in Austin at the end of September.

Jordan Schneider: Awesome. Well, I just want to say, for my part, I moved to China when I was 26, and I already felt behind the ball from the kids who started learning Chinese in high school. Now as I start to spend more time at 35 thinking and learning and writing about all these military history and technology applications, it’s both exciting and also deeply humbling to be at the bottom of a new knowledge mountain.

There are aspects of what I’ve learned over the past ten years when it comes to China and technology which are applicable. Then there’s this whole other universe of things and organizations and institutions to start understanding, and weapon systems to start to wrap your head around in order to be able to make a contribution and say something useful.

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Preemptive apologies to my audience for all the war stuff you’re going to get in the feed over the next few months and years. But this stuff is really intellectually fascinating — as important as it gets. There’s just an endless amount to be explored and turned over in a way that, over the past ten years of writing about Xi and the CCP, I mean, I’m not at 100%, but we’ve covered a lot of bases when it comes to those types of dynamics here at ChinaTalk.

I appreciate you all bearing with me as we mix more defense and defense technology stuff into the content mix, and I hope you all come along for the ride.

Mick, I want to close on funerals. This was the most powerful part of your novel to me — this little moment where you have one of the officers note that all of the deaths in Afghanistan could be acknowledged individually because they would happen spaced out enough to give people time to grieve individually. Whereas in your future Taiwan war, they’re happening by the dozens and by the hundreds on a daily basis, which just changes the “battle rhythm” for grief care. Reflect on that little moment.

Mick Ryan: It’s an important part of military service — acknowledging those we lose. Military organizations are ultimately designed to lose people. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t acknowledge and recognize those people and their families and those who love them. It is a core part of military service. When people die, they don’t just disappear — they live on in the units they served, in the friendships they had, in the families that are left behind. There’s a reason why we have that saying: “Never leave someone behind.” Whether they’re alive or dead, we continue searching for them for as long as we possibly can.

I wanted to project that maybe in the future we may be losing people at a rate that we may not be able to do that individual recognition that’s essential, at least not during the war. It was an attempt just to say the wars we’ve just finished are not the ones we’ll be fighting in the future. We can’t prepare for those ones. We really need to make sure we’re preparing for the future of war, not the past of war. It was all wrapped up with those ideas.

But at heart it was about one of the most famous bits of writing — the funeral oration in the Peloponnesian War. It’s a very powerful piece, and while I could never replicate that, just acknowledging that this is a part of military service was important.

Jordan Schneider: We’re going to be doing a series on AI and how it applies to different technological futures and different domains of warfare. But it’s important to recognize the stakes of all of this and ultimately that it’s life and death — it’s the fate of nations. Being too distracted and too perversely into how fast your missile can go or how autonomous your command and control can get, sometimes you can get too abstracted away from why we care about this stuff in the first place.

希望，活力，和生命力，都从提问中来。

让我们问出一些问题，那些真正的，重要的，不应该被回避的问题？那些理所当然却经不起推敲的问题？那些从来如此却不该如此的问题，问问世界，也问问自己，问问过去，现在和未来。

也问一些别人觉得不重要，但是我们好想知道答案的问题。

问一问why and why not？

为什么太阳如此炙热？为什么树木可以生长？为什么奢侈品和消费陷阱会存在？我为什么还没有成为自己想成为的人？国家和政府为何存在？为什么贫富差距如此之大？为什么我们会过得如此辛苦没有活力？为什么这个世界时不时就有战争？为什么有的国家富有而有的国家贫穷？学习数学到底有什么用，可不可以不学，怎么才能学好？宇宙中到底有外星人吗？

幸福有先决条件吗？你总在表演另一个人吗？最后一次哭是因为什么原因呢？你是一个好被取悦的人吗？你对痛苦最忠诚吗？你在何时爱幻想呢？

让我们不停地追问一下：有没有，是不是，为什么，以及为什么不呢？

对于个人人生那些真正的问题，你有每年和每月都追问吗？我每天都在追问。也借此机会，我们一起最后一次在本播客，进行对真问题的最后一次集中提问和追问。

希望，活力，和生命力，都在提问追问中来。

收听提示：本期播客在莫不谷荷兰刚刚搬入的新家线下录制，因新家临街故有车辆来往声，后期剪辑中已尽量降噪，但仍在特定时有车如流水马如龙的效果，have fun or run!

（本期播客封面由莫不谷用Canva制作：两个问号一起构成的一颗心，access your heart through asking）

【Timeline】这是一期长达4个半小时的饕餮盛宴，你可以在生活的任何时刻以任何节奏和频率打开收听

06:08 荷兰一个关于幸福的选择的调查问题：你的答案是什么？为什么？

20:54 为什么奢侈品和消费陷阱会存在？以及采访金钟罩：为什么花那么多钱买一双鞋？

26:48 一个崭新的想法：其实这个社会给我们每一个阶级都准备了消费陷阱

35:59 为什么会有非常矛盾的生活方式：战略上常常想死，但战术上又无比惜命？

50:32 你自我的价值体系，决定你是否能过上不被裹挟的生活

55:26 为什么有的国家贫穷，有的国家富有？我找到了一些答案

01:03:07 一个判断测试题：猜猜这两个国家哪个更穷，哪个更富？

01:11:00 莫不谷：我在夏威夷博物馆看到非常非常震惊我的一句话

01:27:04 我以为幸福是选择，是决定，但我最近看到普遍它者想要问：难道幸福是有先决条件吗？

01:40:10 康熙来了现场提问：What' s your life like out of acting？（你除了表演以外的生活是怎样的）

01:55:38 为什么看起来善解人意的好人，不约而同会有程度蛮深的抑郁？

02:00:31 给所有想当母父的忠告：千万别让小孩过上寄人篱下的生活

02:30:58 莫不谷：当我选择去创作，我就不再做一个宣传和矫饰表演，这是我对自己幸福的承诺

02:31:42 想要不抑郁需要真诚的自我面对和表达，而这有代价：有被讨厌的勇气

02:35:30 一个非常重要和独特的提问：你最近一次哭是什么时候？

02:54:42 我们为什么会对自己遭受的痛苦视而不见？如何认识和定义痛苦？

03:13:39 你是否有检查过自己的储备箱子，是否有看到和拿起自己已有的禀赋和工具？

03:25:58 莫不谷提问：你自我定义你是一个好被取悦的人吗？

03:30:11 我很容易被取悦，因为我总是创造自己的幸福：即将发起的欧洲线下游荡者聚会

03:34:12 一个很好但有些困难的问题：说出你灵魂层面非全然利他，能有利于自己自由和幸福的三个优点

03:40:08 你有过panic attack吗？为什么在中国很少见？

03:48:52 一个更惊人深入且直接的问题：你对什么最忠诚？你什么时候爱幻想？

04:01:53 金钟罩向莫不谷提问：为什么你会记住夏威夷博物馆里那句话？

04:17:00 最后一个开放性问题：你真心相信王小利这样美好的故事吗？如果不，为什么？

【播客&文章&影视&书籍】

播客：

放学以后往期播客《莫路狂花2：如何对自己充满爱意和敬意，免于混乱逃避低活力？》

放学以后往期播客《莫路狂花今夜不设防：人如何不糊弄和痛恨自己，并找到自己的渴望呢？》

放学以后往期播客《终身学习1：学会面对真问题，不逃避，下决心和谈分离》

放学以后往期播客《52 美妙人生的关键呀，让我们一起扭一扭它》

放学以后往期播客《54 我不要只做世界的承受者，我要对这个世界一顿发起！》

放学以后往期播客《12 真的有人“热爱学习”吗？成为终身学习者的可能性》

放学以后往期播客《24 你和我和她，为什么消费观念和消费习惯可以差这么大？》

放学以后往期播客《25 按需消费应刻烟吸肺，可是谁在定义“必需品”?》

放学以后往期播客《26 “消费自由”的另一种可能：世间美好，我不需要一定占有》

文章：

解锁放学以后《创作者手册：从播客开始说起》：https://afdian.com/item/ffcd59481b9411ee882652540025c377

莫不谷Newsletter《在世界游荡的女性9：莫不谷的滔滔生活和金龟换酒》（游荡者和爱发电均可查看）

莫不谷Newsletter《物理学，原子运动，太阳核聚变和今日中国》（游荡者和爱发电均可查看）

莫不谷游荡者文章《如何挑选一双轻便，透气，舒适，价格合适，让人穿着有出门运动欲望的运动鞋?》

莫不谷游荡者“每周一游”专栏文章《游荡在振奋和敬意中：看完对世界又重燃希望！》

霸王花Newsletter《我的夏日奇遇：那些让你感觉碎掉的时刻，不是真的》（游荡者也可查看）

金钟罩Newsletter《一直想买房子的妈妈，是我的也是她的滔滔生活》《当穿着黑白灰走进彩色的特内里费，我为生活的服丧结束了》（游荡者也可查看）

影视：《肖申克的救赎》；《还有明天》；《安娜卡列尼娜》；《朗读者》；美剧《绝望写手》；《道格拉斯被取消了》；《破产姐妹》；韩剧《Melo浪漫的体质》；小红书“游荡者的日常”：“你对幸福的选择是什么呢？欢迎来作答”；“纽约客Roomtour：我在这样的房子里大哭”

书籍：《命若朝霜》；《红楼梦》；《我的前半生》；《枪炮、病菌与钢铁》；《为什么有的国家富有，有的国家贫穷》；《活出生命的意义》；《被讨厌的勇气》

【为全球华人游荡者提供解决方案的平台】

游荡者（www.youdangzhe.com），注册完成后可免费阅读由莫不谷和霸王花撰写的三篇文章（Run的800种可能、语言攻略和全球签证攻略），目前游荡者平台已更新上线文章分区功能（游荡区、学习区、欢愉区和闲聊搭子区），欢迎大家注册完成后开启内容创作并在游荡者游荡愉快！找到同类！交易自由！手机端用户可把新网址添加桌面，便于日常使用。在使用新网址期间如果有任何注册、支付、退款等需求，欢迎给我们客服邮箱wanderservice2024@outlook.com发送邮件。目前，游荡者已经开通了付费咨询功能，欢迎大家登陆使用！

我们还发起了游荡者平台线上游轮活动，我们作为“导游区”成员（莫不谷、霸王花木兰，粽子、金钟罩，有时还会邀请朋友客座）将每周轮值担任船长，在国内时间每周四更新一篇【每周一游】，分享内容包括但不限于各种花花万物和生命体验的推荐和避雷！在临近周末打工人即将解放的周四，和大家一起驶向一些海域打发时间，度过无聊，对抗虚无！欢迎各位游荡者每周四定期登船！

【延伸信息】

永不失联Newsletter订阅链接：https://afterschool2021.substack.com/（需科 学/上 网）

为全球华人游荡者提供解决方案的平台：游荡者（www.youdangzhe.com）

联系邮箱：afterschool2021@126.com （投稿来信及合作洽谈）

同名YouTube：https://www.youtube.com/@afterschool2021

同名微信公众号：放学以后after school

小红书：游荡者的日常

欢迎并感谢大家在爱发电平台为我们的创作发电：https://afdian.com/a/afterschool

片头曲：《寄生兽》Bliss

片尾曲：《Juice》Queen Herby

播客封面：莫不谷用Canva制作

放学以后表情包：微信表情包搜索“放学以后”，感谢萝卜特创作。

播客收听平台：

【国内】爱发电、网易云、苹果播客（请科学/上网）、喜马拉雅、汽水儿、荔枝、小宇宙、QQ音乐；

【海外】Spotify、Apple podcast、Google podcast、Snipd、Overcast、Castbox、Amazon Music、Pocket Casts、Stitcher、Radio Public、Wordpress

各位好，今天讲个比较严肃的话题：“中国经济正从头部腐烂”。这个说法不是我发明的，而是去年诺贝尔经济学奖得主达龙·阿西莫格鲁（Daron Acemoglu）一篇文章的标题（China’s Economy Is Rotting from the Head）。这篇文章发表在2022年10月，当时，中共刚开完20大，极权达到登峰造极，但很多人盼着新冠疫情结束后，中国经济再度起飞。那种期望很快落空。

两年后，阿西莫格鲁获得诺贝尔经济学奖，中国经济在泥潭中越陷越深。阿西莫格鲁获奖，迎来了广泛赞誉。中国政府意识到不能再无视他的理论，便发起了一场有点滑稽的网上批判运动。一些贴着学者标签的洋五毛，其中也有几个“出口转内销”的“假洋鬼子五毛”，开始发言，写文章，批判阿西莫格鲁的理论，用陈词滥调指责他“唱衰中国”、“抹黑中国”、“不懂中国”。

阿西莫格鲁的分析，都把它的底裤扒下来了，它还花钱雇些真真假假的洋五毛，嚷嚷人家不懂它。所以说，那场批判有点滑稽。

时间是最公正的裁判，也是最残酷的裁判。从2022年到今天，仅仅过去三年，中国经济从头部往下加速腐烂，每一年，每一个季度，都在无情地印证着阿西莫格鲁当初的观察。从房地产连环爆雷，到失控的地方债务；从青年失业率高到不敢公布，到民营企业家信心集体崩塌；从消费持续降级，到整个社会信用日益枯竭，一直到杀鸡取卵，逼微利企业和低收入群体交社保。三年中发生的这一切，都让我们不得不回过头来，重新审视阿西莫格鲁对中国经济的诊断，并追问一个根本问题：中国经济，为什么会走到今天这一步？

在长达三十多年的时段，中国经济以一种让西方世界既羡慕又困惑的速度强劲增长。这促生了一种时髦理论，就是独裁专制的、自上而下的国家资本主义，在效率和创新上，可以超越自由市场经济。传统上，现代世界有个共识，就是经济长期繁荣，国家长期稳定，是宪政、法治、民主加自由市场的产物。但中国三十多年的强劲经济增长，似乎创造了一个现代世界的例外，不要宪政，不要民主，不要法治，不要自由市场经济，照样可以经济繁荣，国家稳定，而且比宪政、法治、民主加自由市场的国家，增长更快，更繁荣，更稳定。

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亲爱的媎妹：

见字不如面 x 2

经过紧锣密鼓的筹备，陌生女人的香港见面会终于提上日程啦！

根据大家的反馈，我们决定把活动安排在8月24日下午2:30。

本次活动聚焦女性间的亲密联结。我们想要创造一个小小的安全空间，在这里，大家可以尽情交流思想、释放情绪、表达感受、分享见闻，用聊天、绘画等方式探索情感和思想的共鸣。另外，我们为每一位参与者准备了周边小礼物，在场互动还有机会获赠精美礼品，心动的姐妹们千万不要错过～

🙌 活动内容：

🗣 上半场 - Dear Talk （60分钟）

• 陌生女人幕后故事分享

• 姐妹聊天室（时事热点、社会议题、文化现象、书籍电影...应聊尽聊！大家可以在报名表中写下自己感兴趣的话题、也可以在现场提问。）

🎨 下半场 - 「身体绘图」工作坊（60分钟）

• 「身体绘图」意为用绘画的方式进行自我觉察、反思具身体验（embodied experience），常见于艺术疗愈、社会行动/抗议等场景。活动当天，我们将在纸上画出身体轮廓，然后用各种颜色、图案、手工卡纸呈现自己的经历、记忆、身份......

  在父权当道、AI主导的时代，身体绘图能帮助我们重建自己与身体及她人的联系，让那些失落的、被掩埋的感受浮出水面。

示例：

🍷 After Party （30分钟）

• 活动结束后的自由社交环节！大家可以自行决定是否参与😊

💡 一些FAQ：

1. 我不在香港，能线上参加吗？

由于各种条件限制，本次活动不会在线上同步，但我们会在Dear Talk环节进行现场录制、活动结束后制作成播客发布。如果线下参与者不希望自己的声音出现在播客中，可以在活动后告知，我们会在后期做特别处理/整段剪掉。

2. 身体绘图工作坊听起来很有意思，但我完全不会画画怎么办？

这个完全不用担心！身体绘图不是为了展示画技，而是“我手画我身、我手画我心”。它是非常私人化的体验，也是一份送给自己的独特礼物。所以画成什么样子都没关系的，只要跟随直觉描绘自己当下的想法和感受就好了。

3. 我需要自己准备纸笔吗？

不用的，我们会准备画纸、彩笔、卡纸等工具，所以只要人到场就好啦。

👉 以下是活动报名信息～

🕑 时间：2025年8月24日（星期日）下午 2:30 ～ 5:00

📌 地点：过滤气泡工作室（香港·佐敦·伟晴街44-52号联美中心13层B室）

👩 名额：25人（报满即止）

💰 费用：80 RMB （主要用于场地租金）

✍️ 报名方式：点击此处链接或扫描二维码填写报名表、并支付活动费用（缴费方式见报名表）。

期待和大家见面的，

陌生女人2号和1号