Conversations exploring China, technology, and US-China relations. Guests include a wide range of analysts, policymakers, and academics. Hosted by Jordan Schneider. Check out the newsletter at https://www.chinatalk.media/
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June 15, 20261 hr 10 min
Emergency 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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June 12, 202655 min
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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June 11, 202631 min
Sen. 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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June 8, 20261 hr 18 min
Paul 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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June 5, 20261 hr 3 min
WarTalk: 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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June 1, 202650 min
The 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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May 29, 202648 min
WarTalk: 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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May 28, 202659 min
Arizona'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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May 26, 20261 hr 9 min
WarTalk: Ukraine's Forward Drone Line with Rob Lee
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
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May 22, 202656 min
Doing Big Things in Policy: It's All White Space
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.
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