The Debrief
The Debrief is a daily synthesis of what the analysts we track actually said. Each morning the pipeline pulls the day's new full-length episodes from their channels, retrieves the transcripts, and distills each one into its sharpest claims and where each voice stands.
From that material we write a single measured read: where the voices converge, where they split, and what is worth watching. Every claim in a Debrief is footnoted to its source, and the links are timestamped to the moment the words were spoken — so you can check the work rather than take ours for it. We synthesize only what was actually said; we do not invent quotes or predictions.
The analysts we follow
Behind the Debrief is a roster of the independent voices we read, watch, and recommend. Each one has a profile with three things:
- An introduction — who they are, the show or outlet they are known for, and what they cover.
- Where they stand — a short, dated read of their current view on each front, refreshed whenever they appear in a Debrief.
- Recent appearances — their latest episodes, playable and linked, plus where to follow and support them directly.
This is not a scoreboard. We do not rank voices, grade their calls, or claim who said something "first." The point is the opposite: to introduce people to analysts whose work we find valuable and to send readers to those analysts' own channels. If their work is useful to you, the best thing you can do is support them directly.
New voices are added deliberately, and only a person adds one — the bar is a real, recent body of substantive work, not a single viral clip.
Intel
Intel is a faster-moving layer: short situation reports for each theatre (Iran, Ukraine, China) summarizing the last few hours of open-source dispatches. These are machine-summarized from public feeds and clearly labeled as such. They are a starting point for orientation, not a substitute for the sourced analysis in the Debrief.
Conversations Among the Ruins
CATR is a podcast hosted by Charles and Peter Erickson, published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon EST. Episodes run about an hour and cover geopolitics, economic history, and the fracturing of the post-Cold War world order.
Peter Erickson brings an uncommon biography to these conversations. Born in Kampala, Uganda in 1962 and raised in Berkeley, he began studying Chinese in 1986 — first in Beijing, then Taiwan. He spent 25 years as a professional Chinese-English translator, working across legal, technical and intelligence contexts, including a period translating for a division of the CIA. He has a daughter who has lived in Russia for the better part of six years. He visited Palestine. He has appeared as a guest on The Duran. He reads widely and trusts almost nothing at face value.
Charles Erickson spent a decade in Shanghai, built a business there, traveled through the West Bank in 2013, and gradually stopped finding mainstream Western geopolitical commentary convincing.
After each episode, topic-specific segments of the transcript — typically 20–30 minutes of discussion — are edited into standalone articles with AI-assisted formatting. The analysis and arguments are entirely those of the speakers. AI handles structure and readability, not content or conclusions.
The Expat Edit
The Expat Edit sources its content from Zhihu — China's largest question-and-answer platform, roughly analogous to a more intellectually serious Reddit. With over 100 million registered users, it's the primary forum where educated Chinese people discuss politics, economics, history and current events.
Western coverage of China tends to focus on what the government says. Zhihu shows what ordinary people actually think — and the gap is often significant.
Articles are selected based on relevance and discussion quality, then translated and adapted for English-speaking readers with the help of AI. The views expressed reflect Chinese public discourse, not the editorial opinion of Ruins Report. The goal is to surface perspectives that rarely reach Western audiences, not to endorse them.
On the use of AI
AI does the mechanical work — pulling transcripts, extracting claims, drafting structure, and helping write the daily synthesis. It does not supply the analysis or the judgments; those belong to the analysts we follow. Quotes go through a second, independent verification pass to confirm the speaker and the wording before publishing. Where something cannot be verified, it is flagged, not published as fact.