ChinaTalk

What exactly is quantum computing? Why does it matter, and what would it actually mean to “win” the quantum race? Zach Yerushalmi, CEO of Elevate Quantum, a Mountain West–based public-private consortium advancing the U.S. quantum ecosystem, and Chris Miller join the podcast to discuss.

Our conversation covers…

What Quantum Computing Actually Is — A primer on qubits, superposition, and why quantum computers aren’t “faster classical machines” but fundamentally different systems designed to simulate nature and solve specific classes of problems.

Why Quantum Matters Now — Breakthroughs in error correction and hardware have shifted quantum from theory to an engineering race, with major implications for drug discovery, materials science, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity.

The Economic and National Security Stakes — Quantum’s potential impact on cryptography, advanced manufacturing, biotech, and defense makes it a strategic technology with an extremely small margin for error in global competition.

From Science Project to Industrial Policy Challenge — The bottleneck is no longer just physics but scaling. Talent pipelines, fabrication capacity, supply chains, and the kinds of public-private partnerships needed to move from lab prototypes to deployable systems.

What Winning Looks Like — Leadership isn’t just building the first powerful machine. It’s shaping standards, securing supply chains, protecting encryption, diffusing capabilities across industry, and sustaining innovation in a tight U.S.–China technological race.

Plus, the encryption stakes, the engineering bottlenecks, the race with China — and a reading list and job resources for those interested in the field.

Thanks to the Hudson Institute for sponsoring this episode.

Zach’s Quantum Technology Reading List:

Quantum Computing Fundamentals: But What Is Quantum Computing? by 3Blue1Brown

Quantum Computing Overview: The Map of Quantum Computing by Domain of Science

Quantum Sensing: Atomic Advantage: Accelerating U.S. Quantum Sensing for Next-Generation PNT by CNAS

The Quantum-Classical Divide: Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve? by Philip Ball, Quanta Magazine (February 2026)

Systems Engineering Bottlenecks: Computer Science Challenges in Quantum Computing: Early Fault-Tolerance and Beyond by Jens Palsberg et al., IEEE Quantum Week (2025)

Further reading if curious:

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut (2021)

Introduction to Special Issue on the Early History of Nuclear Fusion by M. B. Chadwick and B. Cameron Reed, Fusion Science and Technology (2024)

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We discuss…

Hey God It's Dario song: https://suno.com/s/2d0u5eLbSyzDeDY3

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Caleb Watney (Institute for Progress) and Max Bodach (Foundation for American Innovation) on what the new breed of DC think tanks does differently and why the old model is broken.

We discuss:

Timestamps

00:38 — Applied think tank vs. white paper mill

16:56 — Partisanship: FAI's conservative tent vs. IFP's cross-partisan design

37:09 — Why researchers should do their own comms and outreach

50:26 — Betting on young talent as policy entrepreneurs

57:56 — Will AI eat the think tank?

song: https://suno.com/s/I244K1rIpPdB6lO9

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Anthropic’s new model found decades-old vulnerabilities in foundational open-source code that millions of automated tests and countless human experts had missed, presaging a potentially revolutionary moment in cyber.

Ben Buchanan, former senior advisor for AI at the White House and author of The Hacker and the State, and Michael Sulmeyer, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy, join the show to break it all down. Full disclosure: Ben advises Anthropic.

We discuss…

How Mythos found 27-year-old bugs in code everyone thought was secure

The offense-defense balance: whether a Ukraine with Mythos and a Russia without it changes the war

Project Glasswing and Anthropic’s attempt to build a private-sector vulnerabilities equities process

Why critical infrastructure patching is about to become a nightmare

What happens when ransomware gets vibe-coded

Why bio won’t be far behind

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Eric Robinson, Tony Stark , Justin Mc , and Secretary of Defense Rock join me to score the Iran conflict.

We discuss…

Whether Iran’s Strait of Hormuz toll booth is a Trump card or a wasting asset

How the administration fumbled the messaging on the war’s most heroic moment — the JSOC pilot rescue deep inside Iran

The Prussia 1806 parallel: are we a great military machine that’s forgotten how to fight?

Colby’s bizarre knife fight with Pope Leo

McMasterism, dereliction of duty, and why no one is pushing back

song: https://suno.com/s/uGE7Es3ELd6r8ao5

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Ukrainian drone manufacturing. How has the country been able to build hundreds of thousands, even millions of drones over the past four years of conflict? What dependencies does its industrial base still have on China? And what lessons does its rapid scaling offer for the rest of the world?

To discuss, we’re joined by Cat Buchatskiy, Director of Analytics at Snake Island, a military analytical group, along with Chris Miller

Our conversation covers:

How battlefield pressure forced Ukraine to build a drone war machine from scratch — from a handful of soldiers flying off-the-shelf drones to domestic assembly at a massive scale.

Ukraine’s industrial legacy and whole-of-society mobilization repurposed its civilian tech sector into a wartime industrial base.

Why modular design, frontline reassembly, and tight feedback loops allow Ukraine to iterate faster than traditional defense systems.

The constraints of global supply chains, the impact of export controls, and how China is playing both sides of the war.

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An F-15E is down in southern Iran. Justin, Tony, Eric and I talk through what combat search and rescue actually looks like, how a captured pilot changes the politics of ending this war, and why a hostage makes the "pack up and go home" play functionally impossible.

Then: the AWACS that "only" lost a third of itself on a Saudi tarmac, why CENTCOM is still parking high-value aircraft like it's 2003, and what Operation Spiderweb and three years of Ukrainian drone warfare should have taught us but didn't. Plus Pete Hegseth's ongoing purge of the officer corps, the Enron theory of Pentagon innovation, and why the War of 1812 is the best analogy for where this is all heading.

Tony's article on CENTCOM sucking: https://www.breakingbeijing.com/p/what-did-we-learn-centcom

Justin on just war: https://justinmc.substack.com/p/just-war-theory

song: https://suno.com/s/vroapDDimBnmCxdO

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The history of the American federal civil service — what can we learn from its past glories and failures, and where should we take this next? We have ⁠Kevin Hawickhorst⁠ of the Foundation for American Innovation to discuss:

The Pendleton Act myth — Why civil service reform didn’t begin or end with Pendleton, and why starting the story there misses what actually made the system work.

The rise of the subject-matter state — How early 20th-century agencies staffed with real experts — entomologists, engineers, agronomists — made the U.S. bureaucracy arguably the most capable in the world.

From expertise to org charts — How mid-century functional reorganization hollowed out mission-driven agencies and replaced subject knowledge with process management.

What competence delivered — From agricultural breakthroughs to infrastructure build-out, what a serious, technically grounded civil service was able to accomplish.

Whether we can rebuild — DOGE, the abundance movement, state capacity, and why this might be the best time in decades to make the government work again.

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The history of the American federal civil service — what can we learn from its past glories and failures, and where should we take this next? We have Kevin Hawickhorst of the Foundation for American Innovation to discuss:

The Pendleton Act myth — Why civil service reform didn’t begin or end with Pendleton, and why starting the story there misses what actually made the system work.

The rise of the subject-matter state — How early 20th-century agencies staffed with real experts — entomologists, engineers, agronomists — made the U.S. bureaucracy arguably the most capable in the world.

From expertise to org charts — How mid-century functional reorganization hollowed out mission-driven agencies and replaced subject knowledge with process management.

What competence delivered — From agricultural breakthroughs to infrastructure build-out, what a serious, technically grounded civil service was able to accomplish.

Whether we can rebuild — DOGE, the abundance movement, state capacity, and why this might be the best time in decades to make the government work again.

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Jen Pahlka is an American Hero, in a past life the US Deputy Chief Technology Officer and member of the Defense Innovation Board. She wrote Recoding America and the wonderful Eating Policy substack (https://www.eatingpolicy.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips).

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