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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 unemployment numbers that vanished in 2023, why all of China's new strategic industries add up to about 6% of GDP, and why a $10,000 BYD doesn't matter if your kid can't get a job Who's paying for China's AI? Plus: Logan's case that the US no longer has a systemic economic rivalry with China, and Brad's pushback that Chinese supply-chain controls have so far beaten Western demand-side leverage Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 (儒林外史) and why Qing-dynasty satire about corrupt scholars might make you feel better about America in 2026. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 experiment, improvise, and “figure it out.” Will AI eventually negotiate with AI? We debate whether models can move beyond advising diplomats and executives to actually conducting negotiations. Plus, cyber challenges, a chat app for government, and book recs. Thank you to Accenture Federal Services for bringing us this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 when artillery support runs on connections The nuclear shield — early-warning counterstrike, low-yield options, and why a thousand more US warheads would buy less deterrence than a thousand more boats Beijing's Japan fixation — the Chinese nuclear strategy text with a chapter on every nuclear state, plus Japan Inside vs. outside — what you can know about the PLA without a clearance, the mirror-imaging trap, and the pitch to undergrads who read Chinese Plus: the PLA's corruption tip line, Polymarket odds on the next purge, and where an escaped POW should beg for food. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 takes the fall — Feinberg blamed for a munitions shortage created by fighting Iran with the stealthiest, priciest weapons in the inventory, plus NIH biodefense money quietly rerouted to the Pentagon Lying to Putin with AI — ISW's report on Russian commanders faking battlefield progress, and what generative deception does to OSINT and soldiers' feeds The Houthis have Claude Code — Anthropic's threat report, Yemeni drone guidance software, and DeepSeek routing PLA subcontractors' queries to Claude through a transfer station Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 elite through video games because it couldn't advertise its Delta contract The death of the embed — Rumsfeld overruling Colin Powell, the 2013 shutdown, and why influencers in the briefing r4om beat reporters in the field Whether the Army learned anything at all — disbanding the Asymmetric Warfare Group, rebuilding short-range air defense from zero, and Ukraine as the excuse to never say "Afghanistan" again Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 far favored defenders, from mass bug-squashing to superhuman network monitoring, The industrial economics of cybercrime — kill chains, ransomware divisions of labor, and whether AI gives criminals 100x returns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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: 35,000 successful EMALS launches, a four-year delay to the next carrier, and 500 sailors added back to a ship designed to need fewer Whether agentic AI finally gives cyber its strategic moment, or whether dropping a bomb on the power plant remains the cheaper option The offense-defense balance, and why the drone debate should make us humble about predicting it The PLA Rocket Force's new corruption tip line — a purge that fixes a force, or one that reveals how deep the rot goes Chinese components in Ukrainian drones, the Rockchip inside a $400 hugging-face robot, and how much of the Internet of Things you can afford to worry about Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, and options for friendshoring AI infrastructure, The political economy of safety — why pausing AI development wouldn’t work, but a coordinated slowdown might, The coming reckoning between open source and the national security state. Plus, Kafka on bureaucracy and happenstance, how Anton’s years in esports shaped his career, and why new ideas seem to travel more easily through American policy discourse than European institutions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, and the railroad system, The Confederate invasion of Kentucky and other strategic missteps, Strategies for mobilizing industry and civil society for warfare, Differences in institutional culture between the Northern and Southern armies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, complete with jazz clubs and a Chevrolet dealership. The Manchurian cauldron — how the lawless frontier of 1920s Manchuria blended Christianity, Korean nationalism, and Marxism to forge Kim Il-sung’s messiah complex — and why the 33-year-old decided to let peasants believe he could walk on water. Jim Jones, superfan — how the Jonestown cult leader became obsessed with Kim Il-sung, adopted Korean children, and traded tips with North Korean diplomats on running a closed religious society. Christianity as political technology — how Kim weaponized Protestant doctrine and ritual to build a state religion that has outlasted the Soviet Union by three decades. Plus, why North Korea is best understood not as a nation-state but as a religious society, and what Hong Xiuquan and Xi Jinping have to do with any of this. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 competitive EV industry. The rise of Chery, Geely, and other Chinese auto champions — how local connections, foreign technology, and creative financing helped them break into an industry dominated by state-owned enterprises. The downside of success — how China’s EV boom created an overcapacity problem. The role of guanxi and elite politics in deciding who gets to build cars. When Chinese EVs go global — record exports, overseas factories, trade tensions, and whether the same local-government playbook will shape the next wave of industries, from robotics to AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 each of these artists, check out the full write-up on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 models better at software development are much easier to execute and much lower-stakes than running a real experiment when you’re deciding whether to invade a country or sign a treaty. That’s why we at ChinaTalk are trying to kickstart a field aimed at helping researchers and policymakers understand exactly what they’re working with when they ask these models to support some of the most consequential decisions they may make in their lifetimes. We’re launching an evals/essay project contest to explore this theme. I’ve brought on two expert AI eval creators to discuss why the field is important, what interesting work has already been done on how models approach broad national-security and strategic questions, and how you — as an eval professional, semi-professional, or just a concerned person — can contribute new ways to poke and prod at these models and see what they can really do. Joining us today: Florian Brand, research engineer at Prime Intellect, and John Chen, professor at the University of Arizona, who’s done some pretty wild things getting models to start nuclear wars with each other in Civ V. Our conversation covers: How frontier labs are hitting eval-building limits — they’ve gone from undergrads to PhDs to field experts, and the models are now catching the experts’ mistakes. How Civilization V exposes AI’s strategic blind spots (terrible second-order reasoning) and models’ distinct strategic personalities (Claude’s really into science!). Why ethical prompting in Civilization V still doesn’t stop models from launching nukes. Jordan's PresidentBench eval, where a Chinese model was nonchalant about a Taiwan invasion, while Claude wanted to keep Taiwan free and independent. Advice for designing better AI evals and ChinaTalk’s new essay/evals contest! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 — and bets on one-way attack drones Whether AUKUS Pillar 1 is quietly consuming the rest of the Australian military Why manned-unmanned teaming keeps failing in the war games, and what the CCA program got wrong Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 now escaping their sandbox and raising false alarms about foreign hackers. In remarking on OpenAI’s models hacking AI company Hugging Face, Schneider comments, “They think it’s the Chinese. . . . And they’re freaking out. They’re calling the FBI.” For Schneider, the episode is a warning that “we’ve really crossed a threshold with these models,” which now have “the potential to do really dramatic harm just on their own, because we like can’t even physically watch them.” The real AI scoreboard is compute, not model quality. Schneider argues that there is too much of a focus on the gap between Chinese and Western frontier models. Mallaby adds, “In other words, I shouldn’t be asking about how far is China behind in terms of the quality of model. It’s more a question of like, how much can China deliver the AI to users within China, given their lack of computational resources?” China’s open-weight models are a weapon without a business model. Mallaby frames Chinese open-weight as a “counterweapon”—good-enough models pushed out cheaply to erode the economics of U.S. frontier labs. Schneider notes that DeepSeek’s CTO is pitching investors a Manhattan Project-like vision in which profits should take a back seat to the pursuit of AGI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 discretionary policy lever than the West does. The West is really good at market-driven, private-sector oil production. But through this crisis, we’ve seen that Washington does not have the scale of discretionary policy control that China or OPEC does. This time, China cooperated and did the good thing, at least for the broad economic picture — but we cannot rely on that in the future, and that tool can be used against the West as easily as for it. Western governments must grapple with that discretionary gap and not rest on their private-sector bona fides to get through the next crisis. Arnab Datta, managing director of policy implementation at Employ America, and Rory Johnston, oil analyst and founder of Commodity Context, join ChinaTalk to discuss: Why Rory’s own prediction of $200 oil never happened and why J.D. Vance is thanking the wrong people. How China quietly cut crude imports by five million barrels a day with zero visible impact on domestic mobility, and the detective work analysts use to peer into Beijing’s black-box inventories. Competing theories for why Beijing backstopped the global oil market — self-interested altruism, a backroom deal during the state visit, or a dry run for a Malacca blockade in the event of a Taiwan contingency. What India, the Gulf states, and the rest of the world learned from the Iran War and why strategic reserves are suddenly back in fashion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 circumnavigating Africa at 30 knots suddenly pencils out Whether Congress should get an AI kill switch, why DHS is the wrong home for it, and what happens when the boy who cried wolf is finally right Ukraine’s civ-mil drama Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 speech as the tiebreaker Whether open weights even matter when running a frontier model adversarially requires a datacenter, and the case that lighting the dark park makes it safer What the US and China can actually agree on — non-state actors, eval methodology sharing, and why labor displacement lessons don't travel Companion-app regulation flowing from Sacramento and Albany to Beijing, the AI policy brain drain into the labs, and whether Sam Altman's five percent is American state capitalism or just a Trump thing song: https://suno.com/s/xZE1pIKrVBtCfTBO Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 America stopped doing information warfare, Blockade vs. invasion, Hellscape, and why the US should exercise a Keelung–Yonaguni corridor with Japan, The own-goal management of US-India relations, plus Randy's reading list for new Indo-Pacific hands. song link: https://suno.com/s/aRUtODqWdnqhKG3l Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Lily Ottinger and Aqib Zakaria. Special thanks to "Jason Feng," Angelica Oung, Ricky Huang, Tsaiying Lu (DSET), and Yu-Hsuan Yeh (formerly of CSIS and DSET) for their time and expertise. Everyone's views are their own and don't represent any organization. If you want to learn more, check out Angelica's ongoing work on her two Substacks, Taipology and Elemental Energy. You can also check out Ricky's two podcasts, where he hosts cross-partisan debates about energy policy and more. "Jason's" voice was anonymized with ElevenLabs' text-to-speech tools. Finally, we know Angelica is a controversial figure, but we decided to interview her because, on energy policy specifically, her views are shared by a not-insubstantial portion of the Taiwanese public. [See: this poll which reported that 59% of the Taiwanese public didn't feel confident that Lai’s administration could protect Taiwan from power outages, and this poll from June 2025 that shows a near-even split in public opinion for and against the non-nuclear homeland policy.]  Outro song lyrics: 「燈火 Taiwan」 (Lights of Taiwan) [Verse 1] The AC stopped humming on August day eight Aunties in the market, no fan on their face Eleven days of gas, forty-two of coal Then the island goes dark, and the story gets old O-lóng-mn̂g, o-lóng-mn̂g (黑黑暗暗, pitch black) We knew this would come, but we looked away [Pre-Chorus] Forty years they said hūi-hi̍k (非核, non-nuclear) Forty years of dreaming we could wish it all away But the strait is a wind tunnel, and the sun still shines While we burned the future for cheaper times [Chorus] Góa ê kò͘-hiong, lí kám ū thêng-thāu? (我的故鄉, 你敢有聽著? — My homeland, can you hear?) The Franken-reactor sleeps beneath the hill Crystal Yang drank the water, but the people got ill Góa ê kò͘-hiong, lí ài kiàⁿ-khí-lâi (我的故鄉, 你愛起來 — My homeland, you must rise) Not nuclear OR green — we need both to survive [Verse 2] Round 3.1, Round 3.2, localization chains RWE went home, EnBW felt the pain Yunlin's turbines turning, three times the cost While the lūi-chhù (綠能蟑螂, green cockroaches) ate what we lost Behind the meter, batteries wait Zero price auction — we sealed our own fate [Pre-Chorus] Taipower's black box, CPI's lie TSMC pays more so the auntie don't cry But the data centers can't grow, AI waits at the door While we argue if nuclear is sin or chó͘ (善或惡, good or evil) [Chorus] Góa ê kò͘-hiong, lí kám ū thêng-thāu? The Franken-reactor sleeps beneath the hill Crystal Yang drank the water, but the people got ill Góa ê kò͘-hiong, lí ài kiàⁿ-khí-lâi Not nuclear OR green — we need both to survive [Bridge] (Spoken, over soft piano) March 22nd, 2026 Lai Ching-te said the words nobody wanted to hear Kò͘-hiong needs power Not slogans, not pride, not forty years of fear [Final Chorus] Góa ê kò͘-hiong, lí kám ū thêng-thāu? The blockade is coming, the Hormuz is closed Spot market gas at 140% — who knows? Góa ê kò͘-hiong, lí ài kiàⁿ-khí-lâi Distributed and hardened, let the sun and wind rise With nuclear beside them — open both your eyes [Outro] O-lóng-mn̂g, mài koh o-lóng-mn̂g (黑黑暗暗, 莫閣黑黑暗暗 — Darkness, don't be dark again) Kiàⁿ-khí-lâi, Tâi-oân (起來, 台灣 — Rise up, Taiwan) Kiàⁿ-khí-lâi... ChinaTalk is an audience-supported publication. If you'd like to help us produce more content like this, please consider a paid subscription on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 tech-CEO-as-villain premise behind The Most Dangerous Man, Nick Land's archaeofuturism, and the disturbing real Sarajevo "safari" case winding through the Italian courts The SOF celebrity-industrial complex — Lone Survivor, Joe Rogan, Tim Kennedy, January 6th, and the cultural fallout of two failed wars we haven't begun to reckon with suno song: https://suno.com/s/Nw18Ns8p0CK9Blrd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 at the Tony Blair Institute in London. No one is speaking for the Air Force, the Navy, Harvard, the Naval War College, the Tony Blair Institute, or the Department of War. I’m speaking for ChinaTalk. Our conversation covers: Why economic security is really an insurance problem — you’re paying people to keep factories warm, workers trained, and capacity idle for a war that may never come — and why no democracy likes paying that bill. Why the U.S. can’t China-proof its economy alone — the case for a distributed allied industrial base and using allied leverage and counter-coercion as an offensive tool. What $6 billion and four years bought in artillery production, why it still wasn’t enough, and how Patriot missile economics expose the danger of having exquisite weapons without industrial depth. Why you can’t science your way out of a volume problem — AI, robotics, and frontier R&D are caffeine, but the U.S. is still short on food and water. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 end-product costs, environmental NIMBYism, skilled labor shortages, and the need for deeper US-European cooperation. The next resource race — How defense, AI, robotics, and energy demand are intensifying competition for critical materials and what the future of allied industrial power might look like. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 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