5min chapter

Beijing's Overreach

The Asia Chessboard

CHAPTER

The Overreach of the Xi Jinping System

I think this is a kind of classic example of overreach, because there were plenty of experts in China who were advising going in another direction. But nobody could even mention really how to plan for the transition,. Because she had made zero COVID, a totem, a symbol of his power and he in fact had the standing committee kind of declare loyalty - you know, be out high to zero COVID to show how loyal they were to him and to the party so it's very worrisome. I mean, I think that's what makes all of us really concerned that we can no longer count on the pragmatism or strategic prudence of the Chinese leadership.

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Speaker 1

Speaker 3

I interrupted your story. You were you were had gone into financial services because it sort of made use of your natural skills. But at some point you kind of circled back to poker or to gambling. So I'm kind of interested in that trajectory or how you got interested in thinking about the connection between those two things. You know, I didn't circle back. I never gave you. I was gonna say never left. He just

Speaker 1

had to make his mother-in-law happy. Right. I know the story. Yeah. It was more and more percentage of my income. One of the things I kind of find interesting is I have made within a fairly narrow range the same amount of poker every year my whole life. You know, since age, well since age eight anyway. And I get a feeling. If I haven't made my quota for the year by September, October, I'll play a ton of poker. If I make a bunch of money early, you know, by May, I've hit the number. I kind of, I don't feel like you can rest easy. Yeah. And the poker earnings are completely separate from any other money I make. The other money I make sort of goes into a bank account and it's used for the things you spend money on. The poker money is to prove to myself that I don't need anything but my wits to survive. Take away everything I own. I can make a living in poker.

Speaker 3

Well, well, that itself is kind of telling because I would imagine that the fact that you can, if you hit your quota early on, you can sort of put it down at that point is very different from what I think of as a gambling mindset. Of course, people are compulsive gamblers who would just keep gambling until they've lost everything because they can't,

Speaker 2

they can't do anything else. What's your loss quota, John?