ChinaTalk

By Jordan SchneiderNews Technology Government Politics

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Typical duration
71 min
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ChinaTalk episodes

June 19WarTalk with Ely Ratner on Iran War Peace + the 'BS' US-China Stalemate
Ely Ratner, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs and now a principal at the Marathon Initiative, joins Jordan, Bryan Clark, and Justin to make sense of the Iran ceasefire and where US-China competition goes next.
We discuss:
Why the MOU reads as a loss: the blockade comes down first, Iran keeps its missiles and its "nuclear dust," and a younger, harder regime learns it can take American firepower and wield an oil weapon
The "bullshit détente" with Beijing and whether reindustrialization can carry a China-competition message without sounding hawkish
Output metrics over 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

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1 hr 18 min
June 17AI for Science!
AI will make ideas cheap. What does that mean for sicence?
Charles Yang is a fellow at Renaissance Philanthropies and writes about AI and science here: https://republicofscience.substack.com.
We discuss…
Why AI will crack math but not science, and what Mendel's peas sitting ignored for 60 years says about a model that's smarter than everyone
Why China never caught the West's lone-genius bug, and why that's about to pay off
Tools over ideas, from Warren Weaver's six instruments to the thousands at CERN who proved a Higgs boson three guys took home the 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

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50 min
June 15Emergency Pod: Claude Fable Fried + What's Going on at BIS?
Chris McGuire, former civil servant in State and the Biden White House now at CFR, talk about the export control craziness of these past two weeks.
We discuss:
The 5:21 PM letter that took the world's most powerful model offline

Why the "let it rip" administration pivoted to mandatory AI regulation overnight

The incoherent export-control regime: regs that still say one thing while policy says another

The overseas-subsidiary loophole, the Sunday emergency fix, and the foundry gap still left open
outtro music: https://suno.com/s/UVeDiboPyj0jvIgO

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1 hr 11 min
June 12 ModelTalk: Claude Fable (Nathan's pissed), is AI actually productive, advice for graduates
Nathan Lambert of https://www.interconnects.ai/, Jasmine Sun of https://jasmi.news/, and guest Ethan Ding of https://ethanding.substack.com/ check in

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56 min
June 11Sen. Slotkin on NDAA, AI Nukes, Chinese Cars, and Taiwan
The NDAA is two thousand pages of strategy, pork, and the occasional genuinely big idea — this year including a new robotics combatant command and the first legislated guardrails on AI in the kill chain. Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who served in OSD Policy and three terms in the House before joining the Senate Armed Services Committee, joins ChinaTalk to break down what got in, what got voted down, and why markup days are the only two days a year the Senate acts like a functioning institution.
We discuss…
Why NDAA markup is the Senate's best two 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

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32 min
June 08Paul Kennedy on Great Powers, Past and Present
What a profound honor to have Paul Kennedy on the ChinaTalk podcast. Kennedy is my favorite living historian and the writer who’s most shaped my intellectual development. His analysis underpins what you hear on this show every week.
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is an epochal work that traces global power transitions from 1500 to the present. It’s gripping, forest-and-trees scholarship at its finest.
Equally impressive in different ways is his book, The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860 to 1914. Not only is it god-tier diplomatic history, it also gives you a feel for 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.

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1 hr 19 min
June 05WarTalk: The View from AFRICOM with LTG Brennan
Africa is the literal center of the world’s map and increasingly the center of gravity for ISIS, the manpower source for Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the contested geopolitical ground where China builds bases and drops off free weapons. Our first active-duty guest pulls back the curtain on a combatant command that runs on 0.1% of the defense budget.
LTG John W. Brennan Jr. is Deputy Commander of U.S. Africa Command and a 30-year career Special Forces officer, with command tours spanning 5th Special Forces Group, the anti-ISIS task force in Syria, and 1st Special 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

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1 hr 4 min
June 01The Pope has AI Takes
Pope Leo has called AI the single greatest challenge facing humanity. Not war, not poverty, not climate change. So we got a panel together to sort out what this encyclical means.
Joining Jordan are Tim Hwang, deputy director of the Institute for Christian Machine Intelligence, John-Clark Levin of Kurzweil Technologies, and ChinaTalk's resident Catholic, Aqib Zakaria.
We discuss…
Why the encyclical's claim that AI cannot truly "understand" is a narrow theological term of art, and why that nuance gets lost on Twitter

Pope Leo's call to "disarm AI" and the Holy See's potential role 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

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51 min
May 29WarTalk: NatSec in Congress + AI Evals for War
How do you evaluate an AI model for a war you can only fight once? Ike Harris, a Naval officer turned Hill staffer turned AI policy operator, joins the show to discuss his effort to bridge the gap between the labs that build frontier models and the operators who'll deploy them.
Ike Harris is the executive director of the newly launched Frontier Security Institute, and was most recently the Republican tech lead on the House Select Committee on the CCP, with prior stints in OSD and as a surface warfare officer.
We discuss…
The 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

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49 min
May 28Arizona's Abundance Playbook
How did Arizona lock in billion-dollar investments from TSMC, Intel, and LG Energy?
Ian O’Grady, Senior Policy Advisor to Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, joins ChinaTalk to share war stories from the state that’s successfully reshoring semiconductor and battery production.
Our conversation covers:
Labor Disputes and Crisis Management — How the Governor’s Office mediates disagreements between stakeholders and keeps workers happy.

Clean Air Act vs. chips — Why Arizona’s fabs struggled to get building permits despite the state’s low per-capita emissions.

Arizona’s Abundance Playbook — Including a consolidated commerce authority, a culture of engineering > 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

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1 hr

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.