ChinaTalk

Nick Brown is a co-founder of the Center for Technology and Statecraft (CTS), a new think tank spun out of IFP, that looks at long-term technology challenges and opportunities facing the US. Nick was a physics major, spent a while as a software engineer in and around government, and had an arc as an aspiring concert violinist. But we’re here to talk about what is in pole position for my paper of the year: his master class on what would happen if the US cut off DUV exports to China: DUV Immersion Lithography: The Foundation of US AI Compute Advantage. Co-hosting is ChinaTalk’s Aqib Zakaria.We discuss: The case for banning DUV exports to China: Why lithography is the hardest part of the semiconductor manufacturing stack for China to replicate/indigenize and the strongest point of leverage the US and its allies have over China’s future AI compute. The cannonball-sized hole in US export controls: China imported roughly 90 immersion lithography systems a year in 2024–25, nearly two-thirds of ASML’s immersion…

He was recently promoted to DIU’s acting director after spending the past year running the Drone Dominance Program. Co-hosting are Brian Clark, senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a retired submariner, and Justin McIntosh, a twenty-year retired Green Beret who served in the 1st and 5th Groups, who now works in defense tech and writes a Substack called Mind of Things. We discuss: Why the Department of War isn’t going fast enough to procure, scale, and field drones, and how the DIU’s Gauntlet competition is using real orders, competition, and falling prices to build a drone industry capable of producing at scale. What American drone makers can learn from Ukraine’s battlefield laboratory and how the Pentagon is trying to replicate the conditions of electronic warfare in its evaluations. Why the US drone industry is “wide but not deep,” how the first orders banning Chinese motors and battery packs are testing the limits of supply-chain decoupling, and why Drone Dominance alone can’t solve dependencies in…

Richard Bian is the head of product operations for Ant Ling, the foundational LLM at Ant. If you don’t know Ant, they most famously make Alipay, which makes your money and your world run when you’re in China and sometimes beyond. Richard is a former software engineer at Microsoft and Square, and he previously served as head of open source at Ant, where he scaled the open source initiative into a dedicated team. He’s lived and worked in Singapore, Canada, the US, and China, and he loves to build products. Topics covered: The Hugging Face hack as a sign of progress? Why Richard sees the incident involving OpenAI research agents as an inevitable discovery rather than simply a disaster, and why finding a solution now is a positive development. AGI is coming, but nobody knows what it will look like. AGI is inevitable, and we’re still in the early stages of figuring out what these models can do. Rather than obsessing over leaderboards, we need better evaluations and a more open-minded approach to judging models.…

Saif Khan makes his ChinaTalk debut. He is perhaps my favorite example of posting-to-policy that I’ve seen over the course of my time following Washington. Saif wrote some truly excellent deep dives into AI and semiconductors during his time at CSET, then went into the NSC and Commerce in the early-to-mid 2020s, across both the Biden and Trump II administrations, to help manifest the export control regulatory regime we have today. He is now out of government and launching the Center for Technology and Statecraft, an IFP-affiliated think tank, which is already producing excellent, grounded, technical, forward-looking work that will certainly shape many an AI policy discussion in the years to come. We discuss: Why Saif started a new think tank, and the value of deep, forward-looking policy research in an AI world moving at breakneck speed; CTS’s landmark DUV report, which projects that stopping tool exports today could leave China producing roughly 100x fewer AI chips than the US by the mid-2030s, making DUV…

I join Matt and Jerusalem for an unhinged conversation (most entertaining of the year?) about China, AI, corruption, politics, and various other things. Check out their show The Argument, it's good. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin Roose, formerly of the New York Times and Hard Fork, joins ChinaTalk to discuss AGI Chronicles, his new history of OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, and the people who believed in AGI long before it was cool and could make you trillions. Kevin is launching his own show, Machine Gods, later this October. We discuss… Why AGI was built on belief, not just money, GPUs, or talent, and how Google had every piece of the puzzle except the conviction. What drives Sam, Dario, and Demis, some of the most competitive people alive. Whether the Manhattan Project analogy holds, and why the government can’t just take the AI over from the scientists who built it. Why Dario is the most hawkish lab leader on China, and what may have changed during his time at Baidu. How Washington became the second most AI-pilled city in America, and why politicians fear the machine god for their own power. Whether people actually hate AI, and what recursive self-improvement in 2027 could mean for everyone else. Plus: Noam Shazeer’s “divine…

Everyone wants AI that wins wars. Very few people want to collect, label, store, and test the data it runs on. Bharat Patel is currently Accenture’s AI and data lead for its defense portfolio, a former enlisted Navy sailor, and a veteran of the Army acquisition world, with experience at MITRE and across the Department of Defense. We’re here today to talk about why data is the hard part in making AI work to win wars for you — and what standards, integration processes, and governance you need to turn fun tech and cute little language models into things that can actually serve the warfighter. We’re also going to talk about the dark side of data — how poisoning can happen, the enemy’s vote in the datasets you build to find things on the battlefield, and what it’s like to be a civil servant trying to make big programs happen inside the acquisition bureaucracy. Our conversation covers: Why data is the real bottleneck for military AI, why “AI-ready data” is a myth, and why autonomous tanks are further off than you…

It's a new fiscal year with no new budget, and the Pentagon has a fresh batch of proposals. Two stand out: a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, built to buy and field autonomous weapons fast, and Project Meridian, a future-of-warfare panel made up of Elon, Palmer, Newt, and Emil Michael. Is either the right way to transform the force? Arthur Tellis, Senior Technology Fellow at the Institute for Progress, joins WarTalk regulars Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, Bryan Clark, and Tony Stark. We discuss… The case against Auto WarCom: Justin's argument that centralizing autonomous weapons would slow down the experiments already running in theaters around the world Bryan's steelman: a functional command like CYBERCOM or STRATCOM Who should command the drones? Terrible branding: Tony on why killer drones have so far escaped the culture war What happens if Democrats take the House Why combatant commands make poor engines of transformation Project Meridian: what the board can do that ONA, CAPE, the Defense…

In February, the Supreme Court ruled Trump's IEEPA tariffs illegal. So why is everyone still paying them? Because the administration rebuilt them: first under Section 122, then under Section 301, and now the 301 tariffs are in court too. So ChinaTalk's series on the people suing the U.S. government over tariffs continues. Ethan Frisch is the co-founder of Burlap & Barrel, a single-origin spice company importing from about 28 countries, and a plaintiff in both the Section 122 suit (which he won) and the Section 301 challenge, argued before the Court of International Trade the day before we recorded. Guest host Peter Harrell — a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a visiting scholar at Georgetown Law's Institute of International Economic Law, and an attorney — joins Jordan to explain where the litigation goes from here. We discuss… From aid worker to spice importer: wild cumin from northeastern Afghanistan, a company started out of a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, and carrying hundred-pound…

After the global financial crisis, China added a third of global GDP to its bank assets in just eight years... the largest single-country credit expansion in at least a century. Today investment is contracting, growth is less than a percent, and the financial system that fueled China's growth is now the thing holding it back. Logan Wright, partner at Rhodium Group and my former boss, joins ChinaTalk to discuss his new book, Broken China: How the Economic Miracle Shattered and What It Means for the World. Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations co-hosts. We discuss… The crisis that already happened: why the September 2021 protests in Evergrande's lobby were China's catharsis moment Decay instead of collapse: why credit growth fell from 18% a year to 5%, why Beijing keeps rolling over loans to zombie state firms, and why in China "the path to crisis is reform" Jordan and Brad discuss Xi's Perspective: Does supply-chain dominance matter more than GDP? Twelve million graduates a year, the youth…

WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan. We discuss… The Potemkin Pacific — why Paparo has half the planet on his map and nothing to fight with, and how the Iran blockade became the status quo The midterm budget squeeze — what a Democratic Senate means for the defense topline, why Anduril won’t keep working at risk, and how a shipbuilding binge could hollow out the force Who replaces Hegseth — the two Mike Rogerses, and why the talent pool for a lame-duck Pentagon is drying up The AI Force — why a SOCOM-style AI branch cuts against a technology meant to be everywhere, and what a benchmark-setting version could actually do Manned-unmanned teaming — why putting sailors on robot ships is “asinine,” and what combined arms for robots should look like Gifts for Beijing — the Anduril drone Iran fished out of the Gulf, dud PrSMs as intelligence windfalls, and why compute still can’t blow anything up on its own Learn more about your ad choices. Visit…

Julian Gewirtz, author and former Biden NSC China director, joins ChinaTalk days before Xi Jinping’s first White House visit since 2015. With little substantive agenda on the table, what is the US getting in exchange for the symbolism and pageantry of a state visit? We discuss: Trump-Xi summit scenarios, Beijing’s management of uncertainty and protocol, and how the script of US-China diplomacy has flipped, with things once seen as American concessions to China now treated as concessions from Beijing; Julian’s framework for a K-shaped US-China relationship, with leader-level diplomacy pulling upward while competition pulls downward; What Xi’s visit says about the changing political salience of China in the US Why Beijing’s public statements on AI risk don’t necessarily tell us how it will handle pacing and safety; What the decline of Xi Jinping could mean for a political system and why China’s next succession could be especially difficult to predict; China-maxxing from Kissinger to Trump Plus: The Scholars…

Garrett Berntsen was last seen on ChinaTalk in his role as Deputy CDAO at the State Department. He then went to the Department of Defense for a little bit, and now makes a return in his new role as Chief AI Officer at Accenture Federal Services. We’re going to talk about what the national security community needs — beyond just API access to wonderful models — in order to really change how it does its mission. Our conversation covers: Why the U-2 spy plane offers a surprisingly useful lesson for AI: The hardest part of adopting transformative technology isn’t building it, but redesigning the institutions, workflows, incentives, and decision-making systems around it. The government’s need to manufacture its own “forcing functions”: How carrots, sticks, budget cuts, and a willingness to create winners and losers could help bureaucracies move faster. Giving the troops the tools and getting out of the way: Why Berntsen thinks the U.S. military’s greatest AI advantage may come from empowering service members to…

In the deserts of western China sit 320 brand-new missile silos, and for a while, by the Pentagon's account, some of them simply didn't work. The gap between the PLA on paper and the PLA in practice is where Gerald C. Brown has spent his career. Gerald is two weeks out of government, where he covered Chinese nuclear strategy and the PLA Rocket Force at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Now a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, he joins Jordan and WarTalk's Tony Stark, Justin McIntosh, and Bryan Clark. We discuss… Why 2027 is not a go date — the three "strategic capabilities" the PLA pulled forward from its 2035 goals, and why a capability milestone says nothing about intent What the Iran war taught Beijing — day-one decapitation and the heaviest firepower campaign in decades still didn't deliver the political outcome, and PLA journals noticed The purges are what they look like — Occam's razor on PLA corruption, "fake combat capabilities," and why joint fires fail…

ModelTalk regulars Nathan Lambert, who writes Interconnects, and writer Jasmine Sun join to work through a week in which Dario asked the industry to slow down and Trump called the whole thing a conspiracy. Why the Hugging Face hack broke through where years of extinction talk didn’t, and how Bernie, Tucker, and Rogan ended up on the same side What “pacing” even means: Nathan’s case that nobody can measure the frontier, and why it still beats “pause” Who gets Slack access: METR’s monopoly on trust, CAISI’s $10 million, jury duty for AI researchers, and why nothing survives without legislation Will China slow down too? Zhipu and Moonshot turning the crank, military secrets leaking into Claude through proxy routers, and the MSS waking up The Sacks clap-back: whether product liability does the job, and what an eighteen-month pause costs in cancer cures and vibe-coding projects Send in Demis! plus Lu Xun as the antidote to Chongqing TikToks, and what DeepSeek’s Chinese name owes to Qu Yuan Learn more about your…

In the week of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Secretary of the Army walked into the White House, told the president the force is breaking, and quit. Days earlier his boss had fired the Chief of Staff, disbanded the Army's only drone battalion, and cashiered Chris Donahue — the last man out of Kabul. Bryan Clark, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan for a hosts-only edition marking a quarter-century of the Global War on Terror. We discuss… Twenty-five years on the treadmill — how Rumsfeld's transformation agenda collided with GWOT budgets to produce LCS, FCS, and the F-35, and why a rotational, casualty-averse force forgot how to accept risk Driscoll walks — the OSD meddling behind the exit, why Congress won't confirm anyone Hegseth nominates, and a Pentagon run by acting officials through 2029 The meritocracy of meritocracies — what firing Donahue tells every field-grade officer weighing the exit, the auto-promoted NCO corps nobody talks about, and why the Ranger tab discourse is real Budget Steve…

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the Pech Valley represents the war in miniature: outposts meant to shield Afghan villages that instead drew the fighting to their doorsteps, built for reasons nobody manning them could explain. Wesley Morgan spent a decade finding out why. Wesley Morgan is the author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley, winner of the 2022 Colby Award. He first embedded in the Pech as a college student in 2010 and later covered the Pentagon for Politico. We discuss… How a timber dispute became the Korengal — one Green Beret team refused the bait, the next took it, and Big Taliban followed The three tribes of the war in the east — conventional forces, Green Berets, and the JSOC task force, each fighting its own war in the same valleys Ten thousand beanie babies and record artillery expenditure — how measures of performance swallowed measures of effectiveness Black Hawk Down, Ghost Recon, and the making of multicam — how Crye sold the camouflage of the…

OpenAI models mid-training broke out of their sandbox, hacked internal infrastructure, and eventually compromised Hugging Face — the first headline-grade AI breakout, and one that safety researchers saw coming. Is the cyber apocalypse finally on the calendar, or does the industry just need to do its homework? Joshua Saxe spent his formative years as a DARPA and NSA contractor before four years at Meta, where he founded the company’s frontier cyber capabilities evals team and finished as its AI security tech lead. He recently left to co-found Abundant Security. We discuss… What actually happened in the Hugging Face hack, and why AI safety insiders weren’t surprised, The “grad student lab” security culture inside frontier labs racing sixty hours a week to ship, Why the cyber Pearl Harbor predicted since the early 2000s never arrived — and whether swarms of hacking agents finally change that, How nation states will post-train open-weight models like GLM and Kimi into billion-dollar cyber weapons, Why AI has so…

The USS Abraham Lincoln is coming home after a deployment that stretched past 240 days, and the bill is about to come due: mechanical failures, rations down to the emergency stores, 20,000 unfilled billets at sea, and a maintenance backlog funneling into the one carrier repair yard on each coast. Meanwhile, the White House wants to tear the electromagnetic catapults out of the Ford class and put steam back in. We're joined by Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, a former submariner and Navy strategist, and Shashank Joshi, who has just handed off the defense brief at The Economist and decamped to Washington, alongside regulars Justin McIntosh and Tony Stark. We discuss… Why the fleet breaks: extended deployments, generators failing in the South China Sea, Diego Garcia resupply chains, and 12-hour flight deck shifts that don't end The reenlistment cliff — what happens when half a carrier's crew hits their decision point right after the worst deployment of their careers Steam catapults and hydraulic elevators:…

The political economy of AI — things are getting weird, it seems. We have models on the loose, open weights being dropped from the heavenly temple, and data center protests fanning out across the land. There’s a lot of salience in a way that feels really different than it did even six months ago. To discuss, we have the wonderful Anton Leicht, a fellow at Carnegie and author of the excellent Substack Threading the Needle. Our conversation covers: Why even a small amount of AI-driven unemployment could upend national politics, especially if agents start replacing junior white-collar workers and breaking the career pipeline, What policymakers can do to protect workers without calcifying the economy, how to collect better data on AI and labor, and whether to subsidize junior hiring, The case for funding the AI transition with corporate income taxes instead of token taxes, and why offering the government AI equity or “golden shares” would backfire, Data center backlash, strategies for winning hearts and minds,…

Note: This episode was recorded in late 2024. Luckily, there haven't been any US Civil War updates since then, so the episode's content still holds up. Enjoy! During paternity leave, the new influx of dad energy compelled me to read close to 15 titles on the American Civil War. The Civil War is a case study in traditional ChinaTalk themes like technological change and organizational design. It is also a uniquely well-documented war, just on the cusp of modernity, with gripping characters and human drama basically wherever you look. To discuss all things Civil War, ChinaTalk interviewed Jeremy Neufeld, Director of Immigration Policy at IFP and author of an incredibly nerdy Civil War Twitter account, as well as Wayne Hsieh, a professor at the Naval Academy and co-author of A Savage War, an excellent new military history of the Civil War. We discuss… How the Civil War played a role in America’s rise to superpower status, The impact of technological innovation on the war, including the telegraph, the steamship,…

Why is North Korea so weird? Is it Stalinism? Maoism? Japan-style emperor worship? Ancient Korean hermit kingdom energy? No, argues Jonathan Cheng, Beijing bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal and author of The Korean Messiah: The Failed Dynasty That Shaped the Hermit Kingdom. You’ve all been sleeping on the influence of 19th-century American revival Protestantism. To discuss why Kim Il-sung kind of thought he was Jesus — or at least wanted to convince everyone else he was — we have the honor of Jonathan joining ChinaTalk today, with Alex Boyd. Our conversation covers: Billy Graham meets Kim Il-sung — how America’s pastor visited Pyongyang in 1992 and bonded with the dictator over their shared Presbyterian childhoods, while touring a birthplace resembling the nativity story. From “Jerusalem of the East” to totalitarian theocracy — how 22-year-old missionary Samuel Moffett brought eschatological founder energy to the wickedest city in Korea, and transformed Pyongyang into the most Protestant city in Asia,…

How did China grow its EV industry? Hint: it wasn’t really central planning from Beijing. It was a magical concoction of entrepreneurs and local officials using their guanxi to dance around giant SOEs and central-government regulation, leverage private and foreign capital, and just be really excellent business people. That’s led to our situation in 2026 — world-beating companies that have a ton of overcapacity and are set to take over the planet. To discuss, we have ANU Professor Fengming Lu, who recently wrote a fantastic paper in The China Journal, titled The Rise of China’s Electric Vehicle Industry: Strategic Alliances Between Local Governments and Private Capital, alongside Irene Zhang, contributor and analyst at China Talk. We also get into the lessons this story holds for other strategic industries like robotics and AI — plus a little detour into the Chinese podcasting ecosystem. Our conversation covers: China’s automotive transformation from 130 small carmakers in the 1990s to the world’s most…

Jake Newby is the author of the Concrete Avalanche Substack, which covers the best music coming out of China. If you enjoy this playlist, check out Jake’s sets from 2025, 2024, and 2023, as well as his Chinese shoegaze feature. Tracklist: 1. ‘Undercurrent’ — Pu Poo Platter — from Undercurrent 2. ‘忧郁干杯乐园’ — the three mice — from where is my mice? 3. ‘错过的提醒’ — Lygort Quartet — from Through Voodoo Light to Shore of Tomorrow 4. ‘B1’ — gogoj aka Sheng Jie + Deng Boyu — from HEH 5. ‘心的傾訴 Jürêk tolƣawe (Unbosom Myself)’ —Mamer — from Bar xatteƣem, Bar ⱪayƣem (All the Joys, All the Pains) 6. ‘没东西可掏 The Well Is Dry’ — Zhang 'NoNo' Xingchan 张醒婵 — from Catch My Boomerang 7. ‘Gaia’s Breath’ — Wu Zhuoling 吴卓玲 — from Uncharted II 8. ‘the one sounds like sweet trip’ — Cassette Player Romance — from Meaning of Home 9. ‘黑天鵝(feat. LukeDaPlaya)’ — Guo Yinan 鍋一楠 and Yuan 猿 — from The Vortex Reconstruction Experiment 10. ‘Extinguished City’ — DEADTREES — from New World 11. ‘让我飞吧’ — Lie 劣 — from Landfill For more information on…

Contest links: General $50k https://www.chinatalk.media/p/50k-chinatalk-submission-hiring-contest we're looking at submissions on a rolling basis! AI evals: Due Over the past few years, we’ve seen hints of policymakers and national leaders using AI models in their actual policy decision-making. The Prime Minister of Sweden said he uses it for second opinions on policy; the German Chancellor is testing it to draft legislation; even Trump said he had it re-write a speech at some point. It’s fair to assume that senior leadership across the world, and in Washington as well, have started using AI not just for tactical or operational tasks, but increasingly for broad strategic decision-making. While that’s exciting — there’s the promise of uplift and smarter calls on some of the most consequential decisions leaders face in foreign policy and national security — we’re also flying blind. Enormous effort and energy goes into benchmarking and evaluation for things like coding. The experiments you can run to make…

Six months into the war with Iran, the United States has fired 850 Tomahawks, emptied its LRASM and JASSM-ER inventories, expended essentially every ATACMS and PrSM in the arsenal, and burned through the SM-6 and PAC-3 interceptors it had been stockpiling for a fight with China. The administration's position is that the munitions are fine and the people saying otherwise are committing treason. Bryan Clark is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a former submarine officer who runs war games for the Navy and its allies. Justin McIntosh is a retired Army Special Forces soldier — twenty years in, sixteen of them as a Green Beret — who now writes Mind of Things on defense, technology, and foreign policy. We discuss… Why 850 Tomahawks in two months emptied the stockpile that was meant for China The leak hunt at Camp David, and why it should be a very short list How "lethality" became a testosterone prescription instead of an ammunition line item Japan's new defense strategy, which finally names China out loud —…

The FCC has spent the past year quietly rewiring the American import market, first routers, then drones, next undersea cables, and as of last week, robots. Adam Chan is national security counsel and senior advisor to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, and directs the agency’s new Council on National Security. He previously clerked on the Second Circuit and served as a national security legal fellow for the House Select Committee on China. ChinaTalk’s Aqib Zakaria co-hosts. We discuss… How the covered list works The case for “simple and stupid” rules over big-brained ones with endless carve-outs Onshoring plans, allied carve-outs, and the 65% domestic content test Why robot vacuums got swept in alongside humanoids How AGI-pilled you have to be for the robot rule to make sense Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Don't sorry I put two ChinaTalk Records songs at the end! their show notes: On this episode of The Spillover, Sebastian Mallaby sits down with Jordan Schneider of ChinaTalk to unpack a frantic month in artificial intelligence. The conversation turns on whether the U.S. can actually “win” the AI race, with Schneider arguing that the most durable competitive edge will come from compute rather than model quality. The two debate China’s open-weight model strategy as a commercial weapon and question whether it will be possible to sufficiently harden systems against threats like cyberattacks and AI-designed bioweapons. Anthropic’s Mythos model has led the Trump administration to take an AI-safety U-turn. Mallaby notes that as late as March 2026, “if you had said to the Trump administration that they would be trying to suppress an American AI model, decelerate the progress in the name of safety, they would have said, ‘You’re nuts.’” Schneider notes that a similar shift has not yet arrived in China. AI models are…

Roel Konijnendijk of Oxford returns to talk Nolan's Odyssey, ancient PTSD, siege warfare, and the choices we'd all make in adapting. Justin McIntosh cohosts. YoungBoy Never Broke Again as well as James Blake each deliver an outtro song! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The biggest oil shock in modern history came and went without the catastrophe everyone expected. When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, analysts warned that oil could hit $200 a barrel, but the global economy avoided that fate. The Trump administration has argued that the crisis was contained thanks to their aggressive action, but they may be taking the wrong lessons from the avoidance of that apocalyptic scenario. What happened was the largest unexpected swing in global oil balances: China quietly cut crude oil imports by more than five million barrels a day. Yet there was no corresponding collapse in economic activity, no obvious drop in mobility, and no official explanation from Beijing. Somehow, China stopped buying oil from the rest of the world and started drawing from stockpiles we can’t fully observe. That single decision may have done more to prevent a global energy crisis than anything Washington or OPEC accomplished. This matters because it demonstrates that China likely has a stronger…

Five months into the Iran campaign, the US has two carrier strike groups parked in the Arabian Sea, a blockade that may take months to bite, and a daisy chain of tankers stretching thousands of miles because there is no longer any fuel or food to buy inside the Gulf. Now the Houthis have entered the chat and declared their own blockade of the Bab el-Mandeb. Just the OG crew with Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former submarine officer, Justin Mc a former special operations officer who works on defense technology, and Tony Stark. We discuss… What Trump is doing in Iran, why the Navy is short-cycling ships out of maintenance and what happened the last time the fleet ran this hot, from McCain and Fitzgerald to the Truman’s two collisions in one deployment Why a ground campaign in Iran is a fantasy, from the Marsh Arabs to the Alborz range to the Baluch salt flats, and what Shia militias in Iraq would do to the logistics tail The nuclear-powered cargo ship renaissance and why…

The whole ChinaTalk gang gets together to discuss a big week in China AI with the release of Kimi K3 and Xi talking open source and safety at WAIC. We also discuss our latest article exploring the three potential scenarios for Chinese governance when they really get their Mythos moment (you can read here: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/chinas-mythos-moment-366). song: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do actual historians think about the Thucydides Trap? Does our 'low T' discourse all just come back to the movie 300? How the did ancient Greeks fight and why does Homer still keep us coming back 2700 years later? To discuss we have on the excellent Roel Konijnendijk, professor at Oxford and author of Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. Tony Stark and Justin McIntosh join. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Claude Mythos scrambled American AI policy, leaving us with what Dean Ball calls a de facto involuntary licensing regime from the administration that promised us the opposite. Zhipu's cofounder says China will have a Mythos-class model before the end of the year; IAPS says February 2027. Either way, Beijing is about to face down the same question, but unlike Washington, it already has a form to fill out. Guests: Kevin Xu of Interconnected. Matt Sheehan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment. We discuss… Why China's answer to Mythos will look like Glasswing — but started by the state, not a lab, with government ministries and central SOEs first in line Whether the CAC's content-testing regime can absorb cyber, and why a Chinese lab dropping a frontier model without a heads-up would be "very bold and self-destructive behavior" The mixed signals on open source — a Reuters report on MOFCOM and NDRC weighing export controls on model weights, versus Minimax and Zhipu founders publicly doubling down, with Xi's WAIC…

Beijing just announced a persistent Coast Guard patrol east of Taiwan, the administration is calling arms sales a "bargaining chip," and the NDS doesn't mention Taiwan at all. Is deterrence in the Strait quietly coming apart? Randy Schriver is Chairman of the Institute for Indo-Pacific Security (the successor to Project 2049), current chair of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs in the first Trump administration. We discuss… China's new persistent Coast Guard patrol east of Taiwan, and how lawfare, fishermen rescues, and radio queries make sovereignty claims physically manifest, Why treating arms sales as a "bargaining chip" puts the US out of compliance with the Taiwan Relations Act, Whether Seoul and Tokyo go nuclear as hedging accelerates — and what the axis of autocracy means for a Korea contingency, How many Chinese mothers will sacrifice their only legal child for a Xi Jinping vanity project — and why…

We cover: How the Iran War has exposed vulnerabilities in the semiconductor industry’s chemical supply chains. The chemistry behind chip manufacturing — why advanced semiconductors depend on toxic, explosive, and highly reactive chemicals and why some are purified to levels measured in parts per trillion. How China went from virtually no semiconductor-gas industry to the ability to supply almost every critical chipmaking gas in just fifteen years. America’s CHIPS Act versus China’s Big Fund — why building fabs domestically is easier than building the chemical ecosystem beneath them, and why many critical gases cannot simply be stockpiled. Plus, why Taiwan may be the worst place in the world to host a semiconductor industry and the existential supply-chain risks that come with it and, the surprising appeal of a career in industrial gases. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robots are here, and they’re going to change the world, with Unitree currently in pole position. Joining me to discuss are Niko Ciminelli, longtime SemiAnalysis advisor, robot kid and VC along with Reyk Knuhtsen, robotics lead at SemiAnalysis. Lily Ottinger cohosts. Our conversation covers: Why robots are the real general-purpose technology because, for the first time in history, we can decouple capital from human labor. How everyone keeps underestimating Unitree: the DJI and BYD playbooks, the danger of dismissing “robot dogs,” and why iteration speed matters more than dancing demos. China’s edge: vertical integration, actuator manufacturing, and supply chains that make Chinese humanoids much cheaper than American ones. Why you can’t AI your way out of a hardware problem or from a supply chain that makes your robot far more expensive to build. What America should do next: allied supply chains, special economic zones, and industrial policy. suno song: https://suno.com/s/EBSxwT7ltOerJJGD Learn more about your…

Welcome to another installment of the ChinaTalk radio show! Today, we’re diving into Taiwan’s war on green energy. Shenanigans abound in this episode, including: The lights-out scenario — Taiwan only holds 11 days of LNG reserves, and 97% of the island's energy is imported, but the ruling party phased out nuclear and botched the renewable rollout anyway. The offshore wind graveyard — how made-in-Taiwan components drove developers to abandon the world's best offshore wind sites, The Taipower unbundling reversal — and the Kafkaesque system that keeps electricity prices dirt cheap despite the Iran war. “Green energy cockroaches” — why corruption is Taiwan's dirtiest secret, and how the Taiwanese public came to associate renewables with scandal, The nuclear U-turn — How President Lai Ching-te walked back forty years of "Non-Nuclear Homeland" orthodoxy to restart Taiwan’s nuclear reactors. A transcript of this show with embedded source links is available on the ChinaTalk substack. This episode was produced by…

Jack Murphy — former special forces and Ranger Regiment, co-founder of The Team House, and author of the new novel The Most Dangerous Man — joins WarTalk to talk about the strangest corners of special operations history and what the war on terror generation does next. Jordan is joined by hosts Tony Stark, Justin, and Bryan Clark. We discuss… Why the military selects its generals like a company that promotes its best plant manager to CFO — and why the people you'd actually want as leaders are quietly opting out The Green Light teams: the suicidal one-way logic of hand-delivered nuclear demolition, from the Fulda Gap to mountain passes in Iran The difference between a Ranger tab and the Ranger Regiment — and why "is he a real Ranger" is a perennial fight every time a candidate runs for Congress Battlefield medicine as live experimentation — walking blood banks, French plasma you had to sign a waiver for, and why a stateside paramedic needs a doctor's permission to do what a SOF medic does on instinct The…

Earlier this year, we ran an essay contest on economic security. We gave entrants two prompts: What are the most important high level KPIs that policy should aim for? What is the analogy of the Fed’s ’2% inflation and full employment’ target for economic security? Where today would you put $10-50bn to get the most for your investment in economic security? Feel free to propose both defensive and offensive ideas, and either a portfolio of ideas or the one large idea you think will deliver the most value. We ended up with a literal four-way tie for first place, with each judge giving a different essay top marks. We heard from Farrell Gregory earlier about how to spend rare earths money, and here, we’ll be spotlighting the three others who went into the framework question. Joining us today — ⁠Jahara Matisek⁠, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force and fellow at the U.S. Naval War College; ⁠Naveen Krishnan⁠ at the Belfer Center and an intel officer in the Navy Reserve; and ⁠Guy Ward Jackson⁠, senior policy analyst…

To discuss, we have Farrell Gregory, a researcher at the Foundation for American Innovation and winner of ChinaTalk’s Economic Security essay competition, and Joris Teer, a policy analyst at the EU Institute for Security Studies who authored Beijing’s critical raw material weapon – and how to dismantle it. Co-hosting is ChinaTalk’s Aqib Zakaria. Our conversation covers... China’s critical mineral weapon — How Beijing turned its dominance over rare earths into a tool of economic coercion and why the West is struggling to respond. 25 minerals that actually matter — Why policymakers should focus on the specific materials China can weaponize rather than spreading resources across broad critical mineral lists. Why subsidies alone won’t fix the problem — How China’s industrial policy, overcapacity, and ability to flood markets make it nearly impossible for Western supply chains to compete without coordinated action. Reshoring the industrial base — The tradeoffs behind rebuilding domestic capacity: higher…

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 input metrics, the seven-year force-posture problem, and what Ratner wishes he'd moved into the "break glass" category at the Pentagon RoboCom: the pros and cons of standing up a new combatant command Plus Crassus at Parthia, and why chasing parades is a bad idea unless you're the ny knicks suno song: https://suno.com/s/scu8twGj01AIOYSL Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Nobel for How do spend a billion dollars to save higher education AI, souls, and whether your Claude gets into heaven Suno song: https://suno.com/s/3Q11kw74vQmH7eLN Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 open outtro music: https://suno.com/s/UVeDiboPyj0jvIgO Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nathan Lambert of https://www.interconnects.ai/, Jasmine Sun of https://jasmi.news/, and guest Ethan Ding of https://ethanding.substack.com/ check in Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 days of the year — and what it would take to make the rest of the institution work like that, The AI Guardrails Act, the Anthropic debate, and why no one SecDef or AI company should set the rules for the kill chain, Her bipartisan bill with Bernie Moreno banning Chinese connected vehicles — and the BYDs now streaming over the Canadian border, Why Michiganders care deeply about China but not (yet) about Taiwan, The Democratic playbook if the party flips a…

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 the era through its explorations of social, economic, domestic, political, and cultural dimensions of Anglo-German relations. There are fascinating US/China analogies that we’ll get into at some point in this podcast. His two most recent works directly inform the military coverage on China Talk. Engineers of Victory looks at how people and the systems they worked within solved engineering challenges that turned the tide for entire…

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 Forces Command. He’s joined by ChinaTalk’s Justin, who served under Brennan as a young NCO in the Middle East. We discuss… How AFRICOM runs a counter-VEO away game on 0.1% of the defense budget by working “by, with, and through” partners “Putin’s Purse”: trafficking thousands of Africans onto the Ukrainian front lines under false pretenses The Houthi–al-Shabaab pipeline and the threat triangle around Djibouti’s PRC naval base Building an “alternate…

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 mediating between the US and China and speaking for the global South Tim's pitch for a Vatican alignment lab that buys GPUs and tries to beat Anthropic's benchmarks from Christian first principles Why frontier-lab researchers, including non-believers, are treating the Pope as a moral coordinating signal How Anthropic drifting from deontology toward virtue ethics in training Claude looks like a validation of the Christian approach The…

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 GAIN AI and Overwatch acts: and Congress's most aggressive attempt to wrest export-control authority from the executive branch since the Cold War Why you can't just "buy AI": and why national security evals look nothing like the SWE benchmarks the labs optimize for Strategic-level evals :for problems you can't run ten times, from Iran negotiations to targeting at the COCOM level China's robot-army advantage: open-weight models at the edge, Ukraine-style drone iteration soaked up via…