At long last, Jeff Alstott, the fairy godfather of DC AI policy, joins the show. He’s the founding director for RAND’s center for technology and security policy, TASP, worked at NSC, NSF and IARPA, and has a PhD in complex networks.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

for better or worse, the first ep on chinatalk feed I had to put an explicit tag on...

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anthony Vinci, former CTO of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and author of the upcoming book The Fourth Intelligence Revolution, joins as Second Breakfast's first ever guest.

Outtro Music: Otis Redding, Something is Worrying Me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2ughAT80R8

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jasmine Sun of https://jasmi.news/ and Nathan Lambert of https://www.interconnects.ai/ discuss a wide variety of topics of interest around AI and culture.

Outtro Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujC4p7mf0XE&ab_channel=Release-Topic

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

back at it again

Outtro Music: Boys of the Old Brigade, Wolf Tones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoQBXgbVVT4&ab_channel=rebelsongs

Book: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/child-soldiers-in-the-western-imagination/9780813563701/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nate Silver writes Silver Bulletin and is the author of On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, now in paperback with a new foreword.

In today’s conversation, we discuss…

Outro Music: 動物園釘子戶 (Zoo Gazer) - 大大大大大象 (YouTube Link)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Uncle Sam is taking a bite out of companies left and right. Today, we’re going to focus on MP Materials — the Trump administration’s answer to China’s restrictions on rare earth material exports to America.

To discuss, ChinaTalk interviewed Daleep Singh, former Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics, now with PGIN; Arnab Datta, currently at Employ America and IFP; and Peter Harrell, former Biden official and host of the excellent new Security Economics podcast.

Today, our conversation covers:

Why critical mineral markets are broken,

How China achieved rare earth dominance,

The history of rare earth mining and refinement in the US,

What the MP Materials deal does, and whether it can succeed,

The key ingredients for successful industrial policy, with case studies including a Strategic Resilience Reserve, a US sovereign wealth fund, and support for Intel.

Outro music: Ornaments Of Gold - Siouxsie And The Banshees (YouTube Link)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're going weekly.

Outtro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk18bFIgOS4&ab_channel=ThereIRuinedIt

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ryan Julian is a research scientist in embodied AI. He worked on large-scale robotics foundation models at DeepMind and got his PhD in machine learning at USC in 2021. Follow him on X: @ryancjulian

In our conversation today, we discuss…

O*NET’s ontology of labor: http://onetcenter.org/database.html

ChinaTalk's Unitree coverage: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/unitree-ceo-on-chinas-robot-revolution

Robotics reading recommendations: Chris Paxton, Ted Xiao, C Zhang, and The Humanoid Hub on X. You can also check out the General Robots and Learning and Control Substacks, Vincent Vanhoucke on Medium, and IEEE’s robotics coverage.

Today’s podcast is brought to you by 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit that helps people find fulfilling careers that do good. 80,000 Hours — named for the average length of a career — has been doing in-depth research on AI issues for over a decade, producing reports on how the US and China can manage existential risk, scenarios for potential AI catastrophe, and examining the concrete steps you can take to help ensure AI development goes well.

Their research suggests that working to reduce risks from advanced AI could be one of the most impactful ways to make a positive difference in the world.

They provide free resources to help you contribute, including:

To learn more and access their research-backed career guides, visit 80000hours.org/ChinaTalk.

To read their report about AI coordination between the US and China, visit http://80000hours.org/chinatalkcoord.

Outro music: Daft Punk - Motherboard (⁠YouTube Link⁠)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Manoj Kewalramani of the Takshashila Institution and the Tracking People's Daily substack https://trackingpeoplesdaily.substack.com/ alongside James Crabtree, author of Billionaire Raj, chat whatever the hell is happening in the trilateral relationship.

Outtro music: Chalte Chalte Title Song | Abhijeet, Alka Yagnik | Shah Rukh Khan, Rani Mukherjee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkOakcMqJ-8&ab_channel=T-SeriesBollywoodClassics

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices