ChinaTalk

By Jordan SchneiderNews Technology Government Politics

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ChinaTalk episodes

October 17Drone Dominance | Travis Metz - DIU Acting Director
He was recently promoted to DIU’s acting director after spending the past year running the Drone Dominance Program. Co-hosting are Brian Clark, senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a retired submariner, and Justin McIntosh, a twenty-year retired Green Beret who served in the 1st and 5th Groups, who now works in defense tech and writes a Substack called Mind of Things.

We discuss:
Why the Department of War isn’t going fast enough to procure, scale, and field drones, and how the DIU’s Gauntlet competition is using real orders, competition, and falling prices to build a drone industry capable of producing at scale.

What American drone makers can learn from Ukraine’s battlefield laboratory and how the Pentagon is trying to replicate the conditions of electronic warfare in its evaluations.

Why the US drone industry is “wide but not deep,” how the first orders banning Chinese motors and battery packs are testing the limits of supply-chain decoupling, and why Drone Dominance alone can’t solve dependencies in battery chemistry and rare-earth refining.

Why the future of drone warfare depends on systems that can operate autonomously under electronic attack, and how Metz thinks mass-produced, increasingly autonomous drones will reshape military procurement, training, and force structure.

Timestamps:
00:00:00 Intro
00:01:27 How Drone Dominance works
00:08:36 Ukraine, jamming, and the Gauntlets
00:32:41 Component supply chain
00:47:37 Doctrine and forcing functions
01:03:11 Bombers, pilots, and autonomy

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1 hr 23 min
October 16Why a Chinese AI Lab’s Product Lead Thinks AGI is “Inevitable” | Richard Bian
Richard Bian is the head of product operations for Ant Ling, the foundational LLM at Ant. If you don’t know Ant, they most famously make Alipay, which makes your money and your world run when you’re in China and sometimes beyond. Richard is a former software engineer at Microsoft and Square, and he previously served as head of open source at Ant, where he scaled the open source initiative into a dedicated team. He’s lived and worked in Singapore, Canada, the US, and China, and he loves to build products.
Topics covered:
The Hugging Face hack as a sign of progress? Why Richard sees the incident involving OpenAI research agents as an inevitable discovery rather than simply a disaster, and why finding a solution now is a positive development.

AGI is coming, but nobody knows what it will look like. AGI is inevitable, and we’re still in the early stages of figuring out what these models can do. Rather than obsessing over leaderboards, we need better evaluations and a more open-minded approach to judging models.

Open source as a product strategy, not just a way to give things away. How open-weight models can harness global talent, accelerate development, and support a diverse ecosystem of products, and why the real business challenge is gross margins rather than capex.

Why the AI conversation needs more voices. Why we need to pay attention to diverse perspectives on where AI is going, and be more willing to explore rather than declare the endgame.

AI moves fast: since we recorded, Ant Ling has announced its latest LLM, Ling 3.1 Flash, which was open-sourced on October 14 with 560B parameters and up to a 1M-token context window.

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1 hr 14 min
October 15From Posting to Policy: Saif Khan on DUV and the AI Balance
Saif Khan makes his ChinaTalk debut. He is perhaps my favorite example of posting-to-policy that I’ve seen over the course of my time following Washington. Saif wrote some truly excellent deep dives into AI and semiconductors during his time at CSET, then went into the NSC and Commerce in the early-to-mid 2020s, across both the Biden and Trump II administrations, to help manifest the export control regulatory regime we have today. He is now out of government and launching the Center for Technology and Statecraft, an IFP-affiliated think tank, which is already producing excellent, grounded, technical, forward-looking work that will certainly shape many an AI policy discussion in the years to come.
We discuss:
Why Saif started a new think tank, and the value of deep, forward-looking policy research in an AI world moving at breakneck speed;

CTS’s landmark DUV report, which projects that stopping tool exports today could leave China producing roughly 100x fewer AI chips than the US by the mid-2030s, making DUV controls the US’s most consequential lever over the AI balance;

How rigorous research actually translates into government policy, and why think tank experience is valuable before working in government;

Robotics as the next frontier of US-China AI competition, and the security vs. diffusion mindsets shaping AI policy;

How AI is changing policy research itself, the challenge of bringing AI into government, and what AI-driven economic and social change could mean for humans.
Plus, why everyone should read Lu Xun, why AI might socialize like insects, and AI-nannying.

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1 hr
October 12 Matt Yglesias + Jerusalem Demsas + Jordan Crossover Pod
I join Matt and Jerusalem for an unhinged conversation (most entertaining of the year?) about China, AI, corruption, politics, and various other things.
Check out their show The Argument, it's good.

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1 hr 8 min
October 08AGI Believers: Kevin Roose on the Race
Kevin Roose, formerly of the New York Times and Hard Fork, joins ChinaTalk to discuss AGI Chronicles, his new history of OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, and the people who believed in AGI long before it was cool and could make you trillions. Kevin is launching his own show, Machine Gods, later this October.
We discuss…
Why AGI was built on belief, not just money, GPUs, or talent, and how Google had every piece of the puzzle except the conviction.

What drives Sam, Dario, and Demis, some of the most competitive people alive.

Whether the Manhattan Project analogy holds, and why the government can’t just take the AI over from the scientists who built it.

Why Dario is the most hawkish lab leader on China, and what may have changed during his time at Baidu.

How Washington became the second most AI-pilled city in America, and why politicians fear the machine god for their own power.

Whether people actually hate AI, and what recursive self-improvement in 2027 could mean for everyone else.
Plus: Noam Shazeer’s “divine benevolence,” why Dario can’t lie to save his life, and Lenin singing the outtro music

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1 hr 11 min
October 06Data is the Hard Part | Building AI Tools for the Military
Everyone wants AI that wins wars. Very few people want to collect, label, store, and test the data it runs on.
Bharat Patel is currently Accenture’s AI and data lead for its defense portfolio, a former enlisted Navy sailor, and a veteran of the Army acquisition world, with experience at MITRE and across the Department of Defense. We’re here today to talk about why data is the hard part in making AI work to win wars for you — and what standards, integration processes, and governance you need to turn fun tech and cute little language models into things that can actually serve the warfighter.
We’re also going to talk about the dark side of data — how poisoning can happen, the enemy’s vote in the datasets you build to find things on the battlefield, and what it’s like to be a civil servant trying to make big programs happen inside the acquisition bureaucracy.
Our conversation covers:
Why data is the real bottleneck for military AI, why “AI-ready data” is a myth, and why autonomous tanks are further off than you might think,

Ukraine’s autonomous systems as a case study: how years of collecting, labeling, and learning from battlefield data created the foundation for autonomy,

The boring side of AI: how pipelines, standards, governance, and testing and evaluation determine whether models ever make it into the field,

The adversary’s AI toolbox — including camouflage, deception, electronic warfare, and poisoned data — and how to test against those threats.

The 4D chess game of building programs inside the Pentagon: navigating requirements, funding, acquisition rules, and the people who make or break a program.
Thank you to Accenture Federal Services for bringing us this episode.

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43 min
October 05WarTalk: AutoWarCom + Project Meridian
It's a new fiscal year with no new budget, and the Pentagon has a fresh batch of proposals. Two stand out: a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, built to buy and field autonomous weapons fast, and Project Meridian, a future-of-warfare panel made up of Elon, Palmer, Newt, and Emil Michael.
Is either the right way to transform the force?
Arthur Tellis, Senior Technology Fellow at the Institute for Progress, joins WarTalk regulars Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, Bryan Clark, and Tony Stark.
We discuss…
The case against Auto WarCom: Justin's argument that centralizing autonomous weapons would slow down the experiments already running in theaters around the world

Bryan's steelman: a functional command like CYBERCOM or STRATCOM

Who should command the drones?

Terrible branding: Tony on why killer drones have so far escaped the culture war

What happens if Democrats take the House

Why combatant commands make poor engines of transformation

Project Meridian: what the board can do that ONA, CAPE, the Defense Science Board, and the FFRDCs can't; why Caesar's wife has to be above suspicion; Elon's belief that stealth is dead; and who the panel should have included instead

Every base is a target: Operation Spider Web, Europe's low-intensity war with Russia, and why bringing forces home doesn't make them safer
Plus: Newt Gingrich's vital signs, the Pope's AI encyclical, Ben Rich and the Nighthawk, Ghost Fleet, the salmon of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and where everyone would put America's next great military base.

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56 min
October 02Section 301 and the Spice Man who Sued Trump Over Them
In February, the Supreme Court ruled Trump's IEEPA tariffs illegal. So why is everyone still paying them? Because the administration rebuilt them: first under Section 122, then under Section 301, and now the 301 tariffs are in court too.
So ChinaTalk's series on the people suing the U.S. government over tariffs continues.
Ethan Frisch is the co-founder of Burlap & Barrel, a single-origin spice company importing from about 28 countries, and a plaintiff in both the Section 122 suit (which he won) and the Section 301 challenge, argued before the Court of International Trade the day before we recorded. Guest host Peter Harrell — a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a visiting scholar at Georgetown Law's Institute of International Economic Law, and an attorney — joins Jordan to explain where the litigation goes from here.
We discuss…
From aid worker to spice importer: wild cumin from northeastern Afghanistan, a company started out of a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, and carrying hundred-pound duffel bags of spices through customs

Why a spice tariffs won't protect U.S. industry

Liberation Day changing businesses overnight

Suing the president: an even split of fan mail and hate mail, a pro bono partnership, and why Ethan doesn't understand what everybody else is so scared of

Why the big companies sit on the sidelines: Peter on Fortune 500 firms and major law firms afraid of retaliation, why the lawsuits have come from small businesses and Democratic-led states, and why USTR and CBP have stayed professional anyway

The Section 301 case: a statute used some 130 times for targeted trade disputes, now stretched to 60 jurisdictions covering 99% of U.S. trade; a forced-labor justification that gives China the same 12.5% rate as two-thirds of the world; and why the government will likely keep collecting through 12 to 18 months of appeals

Tariffs after Trump: what a 2028 Democrat would cut and what they'd keep
Plus: why you can't haggle with CBP, Jane Goodall's wild honey, pomegranate molasses made under pressure, paying farmers whatever they ask, and whether Zohran should hire Ethan to run the city's supermarkets.
Listeners can use code CHINATALK at burlapandbarrel.com for a free jar of their choice on a first order over $15.

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1 hr 6 min
September 29China's Economy is Broken | Logan Wright
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

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1 hr 29 min
September 25WarTalk: Potemkin Pacific, Midterm Budget Woes
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

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1 hr 13 min

About ChinaTalk

From the publisher's feed

Conversations exploring China, technology, and US-China relations. Guests include a wide range of analysts, policymakers, and academics. Hosted by Jordan Schneider.