Afleveringen
-
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 -
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
-
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 -
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 chamber in November,
Data ownership, the Midwest's data center revolt, and why a healthy democracy would be talking about AI every single day.
song: https://suno.com/s/HdtwRInfqQsDTVMq
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
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 theaters in World War II. His latest, Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of Global Order in World War II, is a sweeping history of a radical transformation in the balance of military power, from the mid-1930s when America was just gaining prominence, to after World War II, when it had no other significant naval competitor.
The Parliament of Man: A History of the United Nations first got me interested in international organizations and gave me my senior thesis topic about the creation of the UN.
What Kennedy taught me more than anything is this: sweat the details, look at the individual players, and zoom out often enough to understand what truly shapes the long-term fate of nations.
Over the course of this episode, we pick up themes from all across his work:
Great Power rivalries of the late 19th-early 20th centuries and their echoes today,
Why potential antagonisms turn nice and why others turn belligerent,
The persistent struggles of liberal internationalists and why they rarely get the outcomes they want,
How China today is not Germany of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
The surprising ways geography shapes global power dynamics,
How fear spreads among nations and why mutual suspicion is so hard to escape,
Why top powers blow it and lose their dominant place in the world,
How systems and innovation win wars.
And much more, including salutary lessons from the Dutch and Swedes on boring yet prosperous futures, how Churchill’s interest in gadgets influenced the course of the Second World War, and why transformative action from the UN remains unlikely in the near future.
Note: we recorded this in 2024.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
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 DIB in exile”: drone centers of excellence in Morocco, South African artillery, Namibian satellite radios
Why Brennan wants to “declare jihad against proprietary data streams” and where AI actually helps a combatant commander decide
WarTalk's first Ivorian dance party suno song: https://suno.com/s/1hhJTtwBn2NGR8eT
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
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 provocation underneath all of it: is the American AI stack a Christian AI stack?
pope as chicago footwork: https://suno.com/s/1Qb9Ce3Bh6saeF2V
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
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 Russia, and a casualty tolerance the US can't match
The "no more NASA" problem: how risk tolerance, mission command, and law-of-armed-conflict constraints shape who wins the deployment race
Breaking into tech policy: Ike's case for why every aspiring policy person should spend a year on the Hill
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
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 > litigation, and institutional factors that help Arizona outbuild Ohio and Texas.
Taiwanifying the Desert — How Phoenix welcomed TSMC engineers with Mandarin programs in schools, Din Tai Fung, and a new Costco.
Industrial Policy Resource Wars — How Arizona avoids backlash based on power and water use concerns.
Co-hosting is ChinaTalk researcher Aqib Zakaria.
Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
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…
The six-month infantry rotation and what isolation, drone threat, and zero-line resupply do to a human being
Why Ukraine has reclaimed the drone edge — and what the Hornet, Bumblebee, and FP2 are doing to Russian logistics
Ukraine's new corps structure, where the brigade-only model broke down, and what the Azov-derived elite corps look like
Why 2% of Ukrainian casualties come from small arms and what infantry are actually doing on the zero line
Starlink as the indispensable game-changer — and Russia's increasingly serious attempt to jam it
Combat casualty care when CASEVAC takes 12 hours, the golden hour is dead, and tourniquets sit on for a month
What the Marine Corps should steal from Ukraine — pushing Hornets to the battalion, Bumblebees to the company, and giving up something to make room
this ep's a little too dark for a suno song
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
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
Ambition + humility as the Horizon Fellowship's selection criteria — and why most candidates need to hear the opposite of what they expect
"We care meetings" vs. "we decide meetings," the Geithner heuristic for surviving senior government roles
The tribal KPIs of the White House — what the Office of Public Engagement, speech writing, and comms actually want from a policy nerd
The conscious-incompetence quadrant and why "your job is not to be the expert, your job is to mobilize expertise"
The posting-to-policy pipeline, the rise of the individual writer, and the introspective work that public writing forces
My Bulgarian tanks fantasy vs. the value-over-replacement case for picking your own hobby horse
Horizon recently launched Launchpad, a Substack on working in emerging tech policy with advice, explainers, and conversations like this one — if you enjoyed this conversation, you’ll probably like their other stuff as well.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
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 Interconnected and Jon Czin, formerly of the CIA and NSC, now with Brookings.
Our conversation covers:
Prestige politics on the cheap — How Trump's delegation gawked at Chinese architecture while Xi scored propaganda points by getting the U.S. president to fawn over Zhongnanhai's gardens — reversing decades of diplomatic protocol.
The G2 that never was — Why Trump's dream of running the world with Xi echoes Nixon and Brezhnev's failed détente, and how strategic competition makes genuine cooperation impossible regardless of personal chemistry.
The AI factor — As Beijing struggles with compute constraints and export controls, the US brings its AI safety dialogue proposal as its only real leverage in an otherwise empty summit.
The midterm calculation — How Xi is withholding concessions until September 2026, betting that Trump will need wins most desperately right before the elections.
Who’s using the pause better? — While China methodically builds domestic chip capacity and refuses even approved Nvidia exports, the U.S. struggles with basic industrial policy on rare earths.
song: https://suno.com/s/cwNGihewAFKpkJls
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
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:
What to expect (and not expect) from the Trump-Xi “stalemate summit”
Historical echoes from the 1793 Macartney mission and the 1972 Nixon-Kissinger opening — summit optics, status games, and the choreography of power.
Taiwan — arms sales, declaratory language, and Beijing's long game on Taiwanese morale and politics.
The good and bad case for China in the Iran conflict, and how Chinese officials may be reading America's military commitments, political cohesion, and staying power.
US-China AI safety conversation after Mythos, China's approach to frontier AI risks, and the control, harness, govern playbook for emerging technologies.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
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 CIA assessment putting 70% of Iran's ballistic missile capability still intact
The Anthropic supply chain risk designation, Mythos, and the "call me" moment
Four F-15Es down, 30 MQ-9s shot down, and why Jack thinks the Air Force was one inch from a televised POW disaster
song:https://suno.com/s/kBuJ4ruS5UkfTdY3
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
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 That We See or Seem, released late last year. Irene Zhang of ChinaTalk joins us to co-host.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Ken Liu argues that:
Technology is the most human thing we do — humans have always externalized our minds into the world and then allowed those creations to reshape who we are.
AI “slop” won’t stop humans from making art that matters, and the real distinction isn’t quality versus slop, but between desire-fulfilling machines and artists who draw from the collective unconscious.
The deeper danger of AI isn’t machines replacing humans, but systems that train humans to behave like machines.
Science fiction isn’t prophecy, but mythology — and ideologies are just mythology’s cheaper, hack cousins. Orwell, Shelley, Tolkien, and Le Guin endure not because they predicted the future, but because they gave us metaphors powerful enough to think with across generations.
Large language models are intelligent, but can’t be wise. Drawing on Laozi and Zhuangzi, Ken explains why everything that truly matters lies beyond language.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
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 wants to do
Who actually benefits from the ceasefire and why Iran has the lower bar for reconstitution
Song: https://suno.com/s/wUhL26xyvUiklraY
We now have the songs on spotify! https://open.spotify.com/artist/3wltBV7tzUjci0vyTSv6h7?si=aVdBxNM7QVOknAXRakJZCg
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
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 2024 export controls backfire? Inside the case study of China going from zero to dominating dilution-refrigerator publications in two years
(48:44) Lasers, photonics, and the Chinese supplier that reverse-engineered a Danish flagship — and is still selling into US labs under R&D tariff exemptions
(1:03:45) Why quantum looks more like biotech than semiconductors: 90 companies, ~7 modalities, and the anthropology of an industry where everyone thinks their qubit is the right one
Constanza's report: https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/quantums-industrial-moment
The Quantum Throne song: https://suno.com/s/9kBx74ZqUHsgYiQ2
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
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 Stark of breaking beijing.
We discuss…
Why the Pentagon is leaking that the U.S. can't win a war over Taiwan — and what it means when the primes, INDOPACOM, and the deputy all scatter-shot the same message through the Washington Post
The case for scrapping the legacy munitions portfolio — burning LRASMs on the Iranian Navy, the GPS-jamming Excalibur problem, and why locking in seven-year buys of Cold War weapons sets us up for the next round of failures
A Special Forces master sergeant, $400,000, and the Polymarket Maduro bet — plus the hairdryer-next-to-a-thermometer scam at Charles de Gaulle, and why financial libertinism is "smoking in daycares"
The firing of SecNav John Phelan — the waffle-bar bundler, the Golden Fleet fantasy, and how Stephen Feinberg captured the submarine program office and knifed his own Navy secretary
A preview of the last two years of Trump II — DeSantis, Cotton, Chairman Rogers, and whether Congress flipping means more foreign adventurism or just acting secretaries all the way down
Song, "Phelan on the couch when it happened" https://suno.com/s/C0LmG53KdrT3evfe
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
outtro music: Pardon Pen! https://suno.com/s/2tXSJ7uJFA7k1pUC
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices - Laat meer zien
