ChinaTalk
Conversations exploring China, technology, and US-China relations. Guests include a wide range of analysts, policymakers, and academics. Hosted by Jordan Schneider.Check out the newsletter at https://www.chinatalk.media/
WarTalk with Ely Ratner on Iran War Peace + the 'BS' US-China Stalemate
Ely Ratner, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs and now a principal at the Marathon Initiative, joins Jordan, Bryan Clark, and Justin to make sense of the Iran ceasefire and where US-China competition goes next.
We discuss:
Why the MOU reads as a loss: the blockade comes down first, Iran keeps its missiles and its "nuclear dust," and a younger, harder regime learns it can take American firepower and wield an oil weapon The "bullshit détente" with Beijing and whether reindustrialization can carry a China-competition message without sounding hawkish Output metrics over i...AI for Science!
AI will make ideas cheap. What does that mean for sicence?
Charles Yang is a fellow at Renaissance Philanthropies and writes about AI and science here: https://republicofscience.substack.com.
We discuss…
Why AI will crack math but not science, and what Mendel's peas sitting ignored for 60 years says about a model that's smarter than everyone Why China never caught the West's lone-genius bug, and why that's about to pay off Tools over ideas, from Warren Weaver's six instruments to the thousands at CERN who proved a Higgs boson three guys took home the No...Emergency Pod: Claude Fable Fried + What's Going on at BIS?
Chris McGuire, former civil servant in State and the Biden White House now at CFR, talk about the export control craziness of these past two weeks.
We discuss:
The 5:21 PM letter that took the world's most powerful model offline Why the "let it rip" administration pivoted to mandatory AI regulation overnight The incoherent export-control regime: regs that still say one thing while policy says another The overseas-subsidiary loophole, the Sunday emergency fix, and the foundry gap still left openouttro music: https://suno.com/s/UVeDiboPyj0jvIgO
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ModelTalk: Claude Fable (Nathan's pissed), is AI actually productive, advice for graduates
Nathan Lambert of https://www.interconnects.ai/, Jasmine Sun of https://jasmi.news/, and guest Ethan Ding of https://ethanding.substack.com/ check in
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Sen. Slotkin on NDAA, AI Nukes, Chinese Cars, and Taiwan
The NDAA is two thousand pages of strategy, pork, and the occasional genuinely big idea — this year including a new robotics combatant command and the first legislated guardrails on AI in the kill chain. Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who served in OSD Policy and three terms in the House before joining the Senate Armed Services Committee, joins ChinaTalk to break down what got in, what got voted down, and why markup days are the only two days a year the Senate acts like a functioning institution.
We discuss…
Why NDAA markup is the Senate's best two...Paul Kennedy on Great Powers, Past and Present
What a profound honor to have Paul Kennedy on the ChinaTalk podcast. Kennedy is my favorite living historian and the writer who’s most shaped my intellectual development. His analysis underpins what you hear on this show every week.
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is an epochal work that traces global power transitions from 1500 to the present. It’s gripping, forest-and-trees scholarship at its finest.
Equally impressive in different ways is his book, The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860 to 1914. Not only is it god-tier diplomatic history, it also gives you a feel for...
WarTalk: The View from AFRICOM with LTG Brennan
Africa is the literal center of the world’s map and increasingly the center of gravity for ISIS, the manpower source for Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the contested geopolitical ground where China builds bases and drops off free weapons. Our first active-duty guest pulls back the curtain on a combatant command that runs on 0.1% of the defense budget.
LTG John W. Brennan Jr. is Deputy Commander of U.S. Africa Command and a 30-year career Special Forces officer, with command tours spanning 5th Special Forces Group, the anti-ISIS task force in Syria, and 1st Special Forc...
The Pope has AI Takes
Pope Leo has called AI the single greatest challenge facing humanity. Not war, not poverty, not climate change. So we got a panel together to sort out what this encyclical means.
Joining Jordan are Tim Hwang, deputy director of the Institute for Christian Machine Intelligence, John-Clark Levin of Kurzweil Technologies, and ChinaTalk's resident Catholic, Aqib Zakaria.
We discuss…
Why the encyclical's claim that AI cannot truly "understand" is a narrow theological term of art, and why that nuance gets lost on Twitter Pope Leo's call to "disarm AI" and the Holy See's potential role me...WarTalk: NatSec in Congress + AI Evals for War
How do you evaluate an AI model for a war you can only fight once? Ike Harris, a Naval officer turned Hill staffer turned AI policy operator, joins the show to discuss his effort to bridge the gap between the labs that build frontier models and the operators who'll deploy them.
Ike Harris is the executive director of the newly launched Frontier Security Institute, and was most recently the Republican tech lead on the House Select Committee on the CCP, with prior stints in OSD and as a surface warfare officer.
We discuss…
The GA...Arizona's Abundance Playbook
How did Arizona lock in billion-dollar investments from TSMC, Intel, and LG Energy?
Ian O’Grady, Senior Policy Advisor to Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, joins ChinaTalk to share war stories from the state that’s successfully reshoring semiconductor and battery production.
Our conversation covers:
Labor Disputes and Crisis Management — How the Governor’s Office mediates disagreements between stakeholders and keeps workers happy. Clean Air Act vs. chips — Why Arizona’s fabs struggled to get building permits despite the state’s low per-capita emissions. Arizona’s Abundance Playbook — Including a consolidated commerce authority, a culture of engineering > l...WarTalk: Ukraine's Forward Drone Line with Rob Lee
Rob Lee dials in from Ukraine for a long-form WarTalk on what the front line actually looks like in year four — where infantry sit underground for six months without seeing the sun, where 2% of casualties come from small arms, and where the "forward line of troops" has been quietly replaced by a forward line of UAV teams.
Rob Lee is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and one of the most-read analysts of the Russia-Ukraine war; he's joined on the show by WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark, Tony Stark, and Justin.
We discuss…
...Doing Big Things in Policy: It's All White Space
Wanna do big things? This week, a how-to guide for technically minded people who want to stop posting and start changing things — covering everything from why every globally important problem is "white space."
Joining Jordan are Kumar Garg, founder of Renaissance Philanthropy and a veteran of the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Remco Zwetsloot, co-founder of the Horizon Institute for Public Service, which builds pipelines into government for emerging-tech talent.
We discuss…
Why $10 million globally on lead remediation tells you everything about how undertalented the world's most important problems are ...Trump's China Visit: Prestige on the Cheap
From Mar-a-Lago to the Great Hall, Trump returns to Beijing desperate for validation while Xi Jinping treats him to strategic flattery. It’s the first time an American president has been to China in seven years. It deserves a podcast, although, as Trivium said, the outcomes could have been an email instead of a summit.
Today’s guests are Sergey Radchenko, author of To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power — which won a ChinaTalk Book of the Year award and got the four-hour podcast treatment — as well as ChinaTalk regulars Kevin Xu of Inte...
The Stalemate Summit: Xi-Trump in the Long Sweep of US-China Relations
Julian Gewirtz, former Biden administration China official, now at Columbia, joins me to chat about the Xi-Trump visit and all things US-China. Matt Sheehan, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, drops by to give his takes on the AI angle.
We cover:
WarTalk: Iran War 'Love Tap' Edition feat. Jack Shanahan
The White House says the war is over. The White House also says it's continuing in a new form. Two weeks after the launch of Project Freedom, only two Maersk ships took the offer. Roughly 900 ships remain trapped in the Persian Gulf, and the Saudis just declined to grant basing or overflight rights.
Retired Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan — founding director of the Pentagon's Joint AI Center and former head of Project Maven — joins Bryan Clark, Eric Robinson, Tony Stark, and Justin McIntosh to dig into the purgatory.
We discuss…
Why Project Freedom collapsed A leaked...(Audio Fixed!!) Ken Liu on AI, Daoism, and Freedom
Ken Liu graces ChinaTalk with his presence. He is the author of the Dandelion Dynasty silkpunk fantasy series and a brilliant short fiction writer — one of his stories was recently adapted into Sam Altman’s favorite show, Pantheon. We all know his translation work on the first and third volumes of the Three-Body Problem trilogy, but even better was his absolutely brilliant translation and commentary of the Dao De Jing. As much as I hoped that project would get him fully on the classical Chinese translation train, he followed it up with a very different direction — a techno-AI thriller, All Th...
WarTalk: Still Very Much Out of Ammo!
Two weeks into the US-Iran ceasefire, CENTCOM is requesting Dark Eagle hypersonics, the 82nd Airborne is flowing into theater, and the wargames keep telling us the same thing — there’s no military solution to the Strait of Hormuz.
Becca Wasser, America’s wargaming queen, currently with Bloomberg, joins WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark, Eric Robinson, and Justin Mc.
We discuss…
Why CENTCOM is using JASSMs to hit targets a glide bomb could handle
What cosplay costs the Indo-Pacific
The myth of US air superiority over Iran, and the SEAD legwork no one w...
Quantum 201: US v China Quantum Industrial Base
Constanza Vidal Bustamante joins Chris Miller and Zachary Yerushalmi to break down her new report with John Burke, Quantum's Industrial Moment: Strengthening US Quantum Supply Chains for Scalable Advantage — a deep dive into the components, chokepoints, and policy levers that will decide who wins the race to a fault-tolerant quantum computer.
We discuss…
(00:00) Why quantum is "pre-transistor" — and why the US still has time to lock in supply chain dominance before the next-gen architecture is even invented (09:53) Dilution refrigerators, helium-3 from the nuclear stockpile, and whether mining the moon is actually a viable Plan B (17:43) Did the 20...WarTalk: No Ammo for Taiwan, Polymarket, Bye Phelan, Will Driscoll Go The Distance?
The Pentagon is leaking to the press that America doesn't have the missiles to win a war over Taiwan — and the Iran war is the reason why. Meanwhile, a Special Forces master sergeant is looking at federal charges for a $400,000 Polymarket bet on the Maduro regime, and SecNav John Phelan spent an hour sitting in the West Wing lobby waiting to get fired.
To discuss, WarTalk is joined by Bryan Clark (former submariner, Hudson Institute), Justin Mc (former Green Beret, now in defense tech), Eric Robinson (former OSC NCT and 101st Airborne, now a lawyer), and Tony St...
Sen. Chris Murphy on Corruption, China and AI
outtro music: Pardon Pen! https://suno.com/s/2tXSJ7uJFA7k1pUC
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Quantum 101
What exactly is quantum computing? Why does it matter, and what would it actually mean to “win” the quantum race? Zach Yerushalmi, CEO of Elevate Quantum, a Mountain West–based public-private consortium advancing the U.S. quantum ecosystem, and Chris Miller join the podcast to discuss.
Our conversation covers…
What Quantum Computing Actually Is — A primer on qubits, superposition, and why quantum computers aren’t “faster classical machines” but fundamentally different systems designed to simulate nature and solve specific classes of problems.
Why Quantum Matters Now — Breakthroughs in error correction and hardware have shifted quantum fr...
WarTalk: Is Mythos a Cyber Nuke? + The Blockade That Wasn't
We discuss…
Why Mythos is a Dr. Strangelove moment — and whether the better analogy is a nuke or a pandemic Who gets the keys: Ukraine vs. South Korea vs. Japan vs. the Five Eyes, and why the Defense Production Act now looks likelier than the supply-chain-risk designation The death of the patch model — and the return of air-gapped networks, mesh comms, and couriers shuttling classified work in person Steve Feinberg's half-trillion-dollar portfolio, the rise of direct-reporting program managers, and why a Senate-confirmed deputy can now make American industry rise and fallHey God It's Dario song: https://suno.c...
The Think Tank New Breed (IFP + FAI)
Caleb Watney (Institute for Progress) and Max Bodach (Foundation for American Innovation) on what the new breed of DC think tanks does differently and why the old model is broken.
We discuss:
Why "counterfactual policy impact" matters more than white papers and what's wrong with project-based funding Cross-partisanship vs. picking sides: IFP pulls the rope sideways, FAI builds a big tent on the right Vertical integration over specialization — the person who wrote the brief should be the one selling it on the Hill Whether AI eats the think tank or just the parts that weren't working an...Claude Mythos and National Power
Anthropic’s new model found decades-old vulnerabilities in foundational open-source code that millions of automated tests and countless human experts had missed, presaging a potentially revolutionary moment in cyber.
Ben Buchanan, former senior advisor for AI at the White House and author of The Hacker and the State, and Michael Sulmeyer, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy, join the show to break it all down. Full disclosure: Ben advises Anthropic.
We discuss…
How Mythos found 27-year-old bugs in code everyone thought was secure
The offense-defense balance: whether a Ukraine with...
WarTalk: Who Won the Iran War? (Second Breakfast Rebranded...)
Eric Robinson, Tony Stark , Justin Mc , and Secretary of Defense Rock join me to score the Iran conflict.
We discuss…
Whether Iran’s Strait of Hormuz toll booth is a Trump card or a wasting asset
How the administration fumbled the messaging on the war’s most heroic moment — the JSOC pilot rescue deep inside Iran
The Prussia 1806 parallel: are we a great military machine that’s forgotten how to fight?
Colby’s bizarre knife fight with Pope Leo
McMasterism, dereliction of duty, and why no one is pushing b...
How Ukraine Makes Drones
Ukrainian drone manufacturing. How has the country been able to build hundreds of thousands, even millions of drones over the past four years of conflict? What dependencies does its industrial base still have on China? And what lessons does its rapid scaling offer for the rest of the world?
To discuss, we’re joined by Cat Buchatskiy, Director of Analytics at Snake Island, a military analytical group, along with Chris Miller
Our conversation covers:
How battlefield pressure forced Ukraine to build a drone war machine from scratch — from a handful of soldiers flying off...
Second Breakfast: F-15, Pete's Purges, CENTCOM Hubris, War of 1812
An F-15E is down in southern Iran. Justin, Tony, Eric and I talk through what combat search and rescue actually looks like, how a captured pilot changes the politics of ending this war, and why a hostage makes the "pack up and go home" play functionally impossible.
Then: the AWACS that "only" lost a third of itself on a Saudi tarmac, why CENTCOM is still parking high-value aircraft like it's 2003, and what Operation Spiderweb and three years of Ukrainian drone warfare should have taught us but didn't. Plus Pete Hegseth's ongoing purge of the officer corps...
The American Federal Civil Service: A History
The history of the American federal civil service — what can we learn from its past glories and failures, and where should we take this next? We have Kevin Hawickhorst of the Foundation for American Innovation to discuss:
The Pendleton Act myth — Why civil service reform didn’t begin or end with Pendleton, and why starting the story there misses what actually made the system work.
The rise of the subject-matter state — How early 20th-century agencies staffed with real experts — entomologists, engineers, agronomists — made the U.S. bureaucracy arguably the most capable in the world.
From expertise...
The American Federal Civil Service: A History
The history of the American federal civil service — what can we learn from its past glories and failures, and where should we take this next? We have Kevin Hawickhorst of the Foundation for American Innovation to discuss:
The Pendleton Act myth — Why civil service reform didn’t begin or end with Pendleton, and why starting the story there misses what actually made the system work.
The rise of the subject-matter state — How early 20th-century agencies staffed with real experts — entomologists, engineers, agronomists — made the U.S. bureaucracy arguably the most capable in the world.
From exper...
Jen Pahlka on an Optimistic Vision for Government Renewal!
Jen Pahlka is an American Hero, in a past life the US Deputy Chief Technology Officer and member of the Defense Innovation Board. She wrote Recoding America and the wonderful Eating Policy substack (https://www.eatingpolicy.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips).
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Second Breakfast: We Negotiate with Bombs, War by Brainrot
Full house with Bryan, Eric, Tony and Justin.
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Overfit is now ModelTalk! GPU Smuggling, OpenAI Cooked? + Open Models, AI Writing
Nathan Lambert of https://www.interconnects.ai/ and Jasmine Sun of https://jasmi.news/ catch up.
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Second Breakfast: Taking Kharg Island, Terrorism, Grift
The administration is reportedly considering seizing Kharg Island, and the global economy is beginning to buckle under the pressure of disrupted energy flows.
Eric Robinson is a lawyer now who worked in NCTC, a veteran of Joint Special Operations Command. He joins Second Breakfast regulars Bryan Clark, Tony Stark, and Justin McIntosh to break down the military and strategic realities of America's latest Middle Eastern war.
We discuss…
The Kharg Island fantasy and why a coup de main three weeks too late is a recipe for catastrophe
"How are you going to...
The Toymaker vs. the Tariffs
A century-old toy company has taken down Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs with a self-funded lawsuit. But how?
Today’s guest is Rick Woldenberg, CEO of Learning Resources, creator of Spike the Fine Motor Hedgehog, and a successful Supreme Court plaintiff in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. Co-hosting is Peter Harrell, who submitted an amicus brief on the tariff case that shook the world.
Our conversation covers:
David v. Goliath — Why a mid-sized toy company sued when industry giants stayed silent, and what that says about incentives and courage in corporate America.
The...
WarTalk: AI, Nukes, Iran and Autonomous War
WarTalk launches! We chat with Pranay Vaddi (MIT, Sandia, formerly Biden NSC) and Chris McGuire (State, NSC, now CFR) about AI, nuclear command and control, deterrence, and how new military technologies could reshape strategic stability. We cover why the U.S. insists on keeping humans in the loop for nuclear employment decisions, where AI may still play a role in warning and decision support, and how drone warfare, undersea detection, and strategic AI capabilities could change the future of war.
05:00 How “human in the loop” became U.S. nuclear policy
12:25 Accident risk, NC3, and the new...
Iran: No Save Point
Two weeks into the US-Iran war, CENTCOM has struck 6,000 targets, but Hormuz is closed, oil is at $100 a barrel, the regime hasn’t fallen, and 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium sit somewhere under rubble.
Shashank Joshi of The Economist, Justin Mc, and Tony Stark drop in to Second Breakfast for week two of the Iran war.
We discuss…
Why CENTCOM’s 6,000-target tally sounds like a Vietnam body count
The staggering failure to prepare for mine and drone countermeasures for the one strait CENTCOM exists to keep open
The prospe...
Why it Sucks to Work in AI in China + Open Source with Kevin Xu
Kevin Xu of http://interconnected.blog/ and I did a liveshow on substack!
We chat about why working in Chinese AI looks so much tougher than building in the West: less compute, lower upside, more political constraints, and a much weaker market for enterprise software.
We also get into Kevin Xu's definitive history of open source in China (https://interconnected.blog/chinese-open-source-a-definitive-history/?ref=kevin-xus-interconnected-newsletter) and talk why open source has become one of the few real paths Chinese AI companies have to win users abroad, even as the business model at home remains brutal.
<...Software Abundance for Government With Cognition's Russell Kaplan
Russell Kaplan, co-founder of Cognition — the company behind Devin — and previously at Scale AI and Tesla, joins the podcast to discuss what “software abundance” could mean for government.
Our conversation covers…
Why government software is so broken — Despite spending over $100B annually on IT, critical systems at agencies like the Social Security Administration and U.S. Department of the Treasury still run on decades-old code that few engineers know how to modify.
How two-year software projects become three-week ones — why AI agents are particularly good at the painful migration and modernization work engineers tend to avoid...
Second Breakfast: Iran and the DIB with Fmr SECAF Frank Kendall
Frank Kendall served as the 26th Secretary of the Air Force from 2021 to 2025. Before that he was Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics under Obama. His new book, Lethal Autonomy: The Future of Warfare, comes out in June.
Cohosting today is Bryan Clark of Hudson, JustinMc and Eric Robinson.
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Autonomous Weapons 101 + Anthropic v DoW
Mike Horowitz, Penn Professor and Biden DoD official who wrote 3000.09, clears up some autonomous weapons misconceptions!
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