I began in materials physics at the University of Science and Technology of China, where the atoms behaved exactly as the textbook said. Curious about things that don’t, I moved to management at Peking University and then to economics at the Toulouse School of Economics. After a year in Florence and another in Norwich, I arrived in Edinburgh in 2013 and have stayed ever since, which by now probably counts as revealed preference over history and castle. These days I study markets that run on code: platforms that shape what creators make, tokens that promise to replace banks, and AI models that may one day write papers like mine (I am keeping a close eye on them). I teach strategy to MBA students, the economics of blockchain to anyone wondering whether it will make them rich (the answer, as always, is: it depends), and large language models to future business analysts. In Chinese, I write about economics, history, machine learning and video games on Zhihu, and post economics videos and songs, some in the classical gufeng style, on Bilibili. History, after all, is just a dataset with better stories.