ChinaTalk
Conversations exploring China, technology, and US-China relations. Guests include a wide range of analysts, policymakers, and academics. Hosted by Jordan Schneider.
Episodes
Unitree and the Humanoid Robot Revolution
Robots are here, and they’re going to change the world, with Unitree currently in pole position. Joining me to discuss are Niko Ciminelli, longtime SemiAnalysis advisor, robot kid and VC along with Reyk Knuhtsen, robotics lead at SemiAnalysis. Lily Ottinger cohosts.
Our conversation covers:
Why robots are the real general-purpose technology because, for the first time in history, we can deco
Taiwan's War on Renewables [Fully Produced Radio Show!]
Welcome to another installment of the ChinaTalk radio show! Today, we’re diving into Taiwan’s war on green energy.
Shenanigans abound in this episode, including:
The lights-out scenario — Taiwan only holds 11 days of LNG reserves, and 97% of the island's energy is imported, but the ruling party phased out nuclear and botched the renewable rollout anyway.
The offshore wind graveyard — ho
WarTalk: Jack Murphy of Team House on Donahue + SOF
Jack Murphy — former special forces and Ranger Regiment, co-founder of The Team House, and author of the new novel The Most Dangerous Man — joins WarTalk to talk about the strangest corners of special operations history and what the war on terror generation does next. Jordan is joined by hosts Tony Stark, Justin, and Bryan Clark.
We discuss…
Why the military selects its generals like a compa
Economic Security Megapod!
Earlier this year, we ran an essay contest on economic security. We gave entrants two prompts:
What are the most important high level KPIs that policy should aim for? What is the analogy of the Fed’s ’2% inflation and full employment’ target for economic security?
Where today would you put $10-50bn to get the most for your investment in economic security? Feel free to propose both defensive
Rare Earths: What is To Be Done?
To discuss, we have Farrell Gregory, a researcher at the Foundation for American Innovation and winner of ChinaTalk’s Economic Security essay competition, and Joris Teer, a policy analyst at the EU Institute for Security Studies who authored Beijing’s critical raw material weapon – and how to dismantle it. Co-hosting is ChinaTalk’s Aqib Zakaria.
Our conversation covers...
China’s critical mi
WarTalk 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 regim
AI 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
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 polic
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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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 vo
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
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
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 ency
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 Republ
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
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
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 Hor
Trump's China Visit: Prestige on the Cheap
From Mar-a-Lago to the Great Hall, Trump returns to Beijing desperate for validation while Xi Jinping treats him to strategic flattery. It’s the first time an American president has been to China in seven years. It deserves a podcast, although, as Trivium said, the outcomes could have been an email instead of a summit.
Today’s guests are Sergey Radchenko, author of To Run the World: The Kremlin’s
The Stalemate Summit: Xi-Trump in the Long Sweep of US-China Relations
Julian Gewirtz, former Biden administration China official, now at Columbia, joins me to chat about the Xi-Trump visit and all things US-China. Matt Sheehan, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, drops by to give his takes on the AI angle.We cover:
What to expect (and not expect) from the Trump-Xi “stalemate summit”
Historical echoes from the 1793 Macartney missi
WarTalk: Iran War 'Love Tap' Edition feat. Jack Shanahan
The White House says the war is over. The White House also says it's continuing in a new form. Two weeks after the launch of Project Freedom, only two Maersk ships took the offer. Roughly 900 ships remain trapped in the Persian Gulf, and the Saudis just declined to grant basing or overflight rights.
Retired Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan — founding director of the Pentagon's Joint AI Center and former he
(Audio Fixed!!) Ken Liu on AI, Daoism, and Freedom
Ken Liu graces ChinaTalk with his presence. He is the author of the Dandelion Dynasty silkpunk fantasy series and a brilliant short fiction writer — one of his stories was recently adapted into Sam Altman’s favorite show, Pantheon. We all know his translation work on the first and third volumes of the Three-Body Problem trilogy, but even better was his absolutely brilliant translation and commenta
WarTalk: Still Very Much Out of Ammo!
Two weeks into the US-Iran ceasefire, CENTCOM is requesting Dark Eagle hypersonics, the 82nd Airborne is flowing into theater, and the wargames keep telling us the same thing — there’s no military solution to the Strait of Hormuz.
Becca Wasser, America’s wargaming queen, currently with Bloomberg, joins WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark, Eric Robinson, and Justin Mc.
We discuss…
Why CENTCOM is us
Quantum 201: US v China Quantum Industrial Base
Constanza Vidal Bustamante joins Chris Miller and Zachary Yerushalmi to break down her new report with John Burke, Quantum's Industrial Moment: Strengthening US Quantum Supply Chains for Scalable Advantage — a deep dive into the components, chokepoints, and policy levers that will decide who wins the race to a fault-tolerant quantum computer.
We discuss…
(00:00) Why quantum is "pre-transisto
WarTalk: No Ammo for Taiwan, Polymarket, Bye Phelan, Will Driscoll Go The Distance?
The Pentagon is leaking to the press that America doesn't have the missiles to win a war over Taiwan — and the Iran war is the reason why. Meanwhile, a Special Forces master sergeant is looking at federal charges for a $400,000 Polymarket bet on the Maduro regime, and SecNav John Phelan spent an hour sitting in the West Wing lobby waiting to get fired.
To discuss, WarTalk is joined by Bryan Clark
Sen. Chris Murphy on Corruption, China and AI
outtro music: Pardon Pen! https://suno.com/s/2tXSJ7uJFA7k1pUC
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Quantum 101
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 qu
WarTalk: Is Mythos a Cyber Nuke? + The Blockade That Wasn't
We discuss…
Why Mythos is a Dr. Strangelove moment — and whether the better analogy is a nuke or a pandemic
Who gets the keys: Ukraine vs. South Korea vs. Japan vs. the Five Eyes, and why the Defense Production Act now looks likelier than the supply-chain-risk designation
The death of the patch model — and the return of air-gapped networks, mesh comms, and couriers shuttling classifie
The Think Tank New Breed (IFP + FAI)
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:
Why "counterfactual policy impact" matters more than white papers and what's wrong with project-based funding
Cross-partisanship vs. picking sides: IFP pulls the rope sideways, FAI builds a big tent o
Claude Mythos and National Power
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, jo
WarTalk: Who Won the Iran War? (Second Breakfast Rebranded...)
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 fo
How Ukraine Makes Drones
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 gr
Second Breakfast: F-15, Pete's Purges, CENTCOM Hubris, War of 1812
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
The American Federal Civil Service: A History
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
Jen Pahlka on an Optimistic Vision for Government Renewal!
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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Second Breakfast: We Negotiate with Bombs, War by Brainrot
Full house with Bryan, Eric, Tony and Justin.
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Overfit is now ModelTalk! GPU Smuggling, OpenAI Cooked? + Open Models, AI Writing
Nathan Lambert of https://www.interconnects.ai/ and Jasmine Sun of https://jasmi.news/ catch up.
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Second Breakfast: Taking Kharg Island, Terrorism, Grift
The administration is reportedly considering seizing Kharg Island, and the global economy is beginning to buckle under the pressure of disrupted energy flows.
Eric Robinson is a lawyer now who worked in NCTC, a veteran of Joint Special Operations Command. He joins Second Breakfast regulars Bryan Clark, Tony Stark, and Justin McIntosh to break down the military and strategic realities of America's
The Toymaker vs. the Tariffs
A century-old toy company has taken down Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs with a self-funded lawsuit. But how?
Today’s guest is Rick Woldenberg, CEO of Learning Resources, creator of Spike the Fine Motor Hedgehog, and a successful Supreme Court plaintiff in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. Co-hosting is Peter Harrell, who submitted an amicus brief on the tariff case that shook the world.
Our con
WarTalk: AI, Nukes, Iran and Autonomous War
WarTalk launches! We chat with Pranay Vaddi (MIT, Sandia, formerly Biden NSC) and Chris McGuire (State, NSC, now CFR) about AI, nuclear command and control, deterrence, and how new military technologies could reshape strategic stability. We cover why the U.S. insists on keeping humans in the loop for nuclear employment decisions, where AI may still play a role in warning and decision support, and
Iran: No Save Point
Two weeks into the US-Iran war, CENTCOM has struck 6,000 targets, but Hormuz is closed, oil is at $100 a barrel, the regime hasn’t fallen, and 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium sit somewhere under rubble.
Shashank Joshi of The Economist, Justin Mc, and Tony Stark drop in to Second Breakfast for week two of the Iran war.
We discuss…
Why CENTCOM’s 6,000-target tally sounds like a Vietn
Why it Sucks to Work in AI in China + Open Source with Kevin Xu
Kevin Xu of http://interconnected.blog/ and I did a liveshow on substack!
We chat about why working in Chinese AI looks so much tougher than building in the West: less compute, lower upside, more political constraints, and a much weaker market for enterprise software.
We also get into Kevin Xu's definitive history of open source in China (https://interconnected.blog/chinese-open-source-a-defin
Software Abundance for Government With Cognition's Russell Kaplan
Russell Kaplan, co-founder of Cognition — the company behind Devin — and previously at Scale AI and Tesla, joins the podcast to discuss what “software abundance” could mean for government.
Our conversation covers…
Why government software is so broken — Despite spending over $100B annually on IT, critical systems at agencies like the Social Security Administration and U.S. Department of the T
Second Breakfast: Iran and the DIB with Fmr SECAF Frank Kendall
Frank Kendall served as the 26th Secretary of the Air Force from 2021 to 2025. Before that he was Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics under Obama. His new book, Lethal Autonomy: The Future of Warfare, comes out in June.
Cohosting today is Bryan Clark of Hudson, JustinMc and Eric Robinson.
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Autonomous Weapons 101 + Anthropic v DoW
Mike Horowitz, Penn Professor and Biden DoD official who wrote 3000.09, clears up some autonomous weapons misconceptions!
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Emergency Pod: Iran + Anthropic
An all-star cast today with:
Emmy Probasco, a fellow at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) and former Navy officer with deep expertise in autonomous weapons and military AI adoption;
Michael Horowitz, a University of Pennsylvania professor who previously ran the Pentagon office that rewrote U.S. policy on autonomy in weapons systems;
Bryan Clark, a defense analyst
Second Breakfast: Anthropic, SecDefs being weird
what a mess!
Wario Amodei's slow jam vibe: https://suno.com/s/cf3KDdVQ5F0KCjow
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Lawrence Freedman on Strategy and Nuclear War
Lawrence Freedman is the dean of strategic studies. He’s written books about the Falklands War, nuclear strategy, political-military relations, Kennedy’s foreign policy, the revolution of military affairs, and (my personal favorite) the history of strategy.
Freedman is now part of the father-son writing duo samf.substack.com.
Note: we recorded this in the summer of 2023. Thanks to the Hudson I
Emergency Pod: SCOTUS Scraps Tariffs!
Peter Harrell drops in, attorney who served in the Obama and Biden admins and submitted a brief in this case
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Second Breakfast: Iran, Munich + European Defense Tech, Anthropic
Bryan Clark opens the show talking Iran. Recurring cohosts include Justin Mc, Tony Stark and Eric Robinson.
Eric Slesinger of 201 Ventures drops in https://ericslesinger.com/
outtro music: rubio's speech https://suno.com/s/KnIpTyZIU7iJSeIf
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How the US Won Back Chip Manufacturing
We’re here for a CHIPS Act megapod, in person with Mike Schmidt and Todd Fisher, the director and founding CIO of the CHIPS Program Office, respectively.
We discuss…
The mechanisms behind the success of the CHIPS Act,
What CHIPS can teach us about other industrial policy challenges, like APIs and rare earths,
What it takes to build a successful industrial policy implementation te
Chinese Peptides (Reported Podcast Special Edition!)
We're trying out a different format to explore "Chinese peptides." We talk to biohackers using compounds like BPC-157 to heal extreme injuries, go undercover as peptide buyers, and discuss the challenges of reporting on the Chinese pharmaceutical ecosystem with the legendary Hamilton Morris.
Special thanks to guests Jasmine Sun, Hamilton Morris, Aaron Kesselheim, Marcus, and David. This episode w
Rickover’s Playbook: Building Hard Things Inside the State
Admiral Rickover — America’s most famous, perhaps most influential admiral of the second half of the 20th century. To discuss his unbelievable life story, dramatic impact on the Cold War, and implications for the future of what the U.S. government should do when it tries to build hard things, we have two guests — Charles Yang, founder of the Center for Industrial Strategy, who also does AI science
China's Gaming Landscape
Today, we’re discussing all things gaming in China! Our illustrious guest is Daniel Camilo, a Portuguese national who has spent over a decade in the Chinese video game industry. We cover the most important titles, publishing and development trends, and where the industry is headed.
We discuss:
How China’s game industry climbed the value chain from low-cost mobile and PC titles to globally co
Chinamaxxing
Minh Tran (https://www.couldabeenatthe.club/), Afra Wang (https://afra.work/) and Lauren Teixeira (https://lrntex.substack.com/) join me to talk about Chinamaxxing — the growing fascination among younger Americans with Chinese short-form content. We discuss why these videos feel so appealing in a moment of pessimism at home, how Trump’s America shapes that gaze, and where the “shiny,” abundance-dr
Military Revolutions with Ed Luttwak
Today’s guest is the legendary strategist Edward Luttwak — the Machiavelli of Maryland. He’s consulted for presidents, prime ministers, and secretaries of defense, and authored magnificent books on Byzantine history, a guide to planning a successful coup, and an opus on the logic of strategy and the rise of China. He raises cows, too.
We recorded this episode in Feb of 2024.
Thanks to the Hudso
Second Breakfast: Invading Canada, Benedict Arnold, Iran
whole gang is here. Also a little Minnesota and 30 seconds of NDS (which is all it deserves)
suno: https://suno.com/s/SJ0FoEPMVZ3QS441
'He couldn’t capture Canada, but captured infamy—
The only general in history who failed at treason and geography!'
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EMERGENCY POD: PLA Purges Continue!
Jon Czin, former CIA analyst and NSC staffer, returns to talk purges. We have far too much fun.
The disney take on PLA purges: https://suno.com/s/Wv1yQyxdUhWBzyA0
08:50 Deep read into the WSJ nuke traitor allegations
22:10 Xi getting paranoid?
26:13 Taiwan implications
32:38 Succession implications
45:55 It must really suck to work in Chinese politics
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Overfit: Claude Code is Everything, Trump Vibe Codes
Jasmine Sun of https://jasmi.news/ and Nathan Lambert of https://www.interconnects.ai/ report for duty. Athena makes a brief guest appearance before dipping for pilates.
Jordan's flower app: https://cut-from-the-masters.vercel.app/
Jordan's acting app: https://acting-trainer.vercel.app/
Jordan's mahjong trainer app: https://mazel-jong.vercel.app
Suno song: https://suno.com/s/BArMAm90qTxbupUz
L
Second Breakfast: Battleships, Golden Dome, Greenland, Kash, Presidential Comedy
Bryan Clark (former submariner at Hudson), Eric Robinson, and Justin McIntosh report for duty.
Davos disco: https://suno.com/s/2SpR62beigk2JeDr
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The Future of Economic Security with Dan Kim and Chris Miller
Is there such a thing as MAD in economic warfare? How should we measure the effectiveness of our industrial policy tools, and what outcomes should we be aiming for anyway?
Our guest today is Dan Kim, who served at USITC with stints at Qualcomm and SK hynix before returning to government as the Chief Economist for the CHIPS Program Office. He recently joined TechInsights as Chief Strategy Officer.
Party Time! Jon Czin on US-China in 2025 and 2026
Jon Czin spent years as a top China analyst at the CIA, served as China Director on Biden’s National Security Council, and now works at the Brookings Institution. We talk through:
Xi, Trump, and what drove the roller coaster of US-China relations in 2025
Why it feels too quiet right now and what could get this train off the rails in 2026
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Richard Danzig on Cyber and AI
Richard Danzig, national treasure, joins the podcast to discuss the national security implications of AI in the cyber context.
Do note we conducted this interview in July of 2025.
We discuss Richard's excellent paper on AI and cyber you can find here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA4079-1.html
Teddy Collins cohosts. Thanks to Hudson for sponsoring this episode.
Learn more about your
The China Commission Reports!
The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission late last year released its annual report to Congress. ChinaTalk welcomes two commissioners to the pod to discuss.
Before joining the Hoover Institution, Mike Kuiken spent two decades on the Hill including as the senior national security advisor for Senator Schumer and as a PSM on the Senate Armed Services Committee. He was appointed to the c
Ben Buchanan on AI and Cyber
Happy New Year! This is your reminder to fill out the ChinaTalk audience survey. The link is here. We’re here to give the people what they want, so please fill it out! ~Lily 🌸
Ben Buchanan, now a Professor at SAIS, served in the Biden White House in many guises, including as a special advisor on AI. He’s also the author of three books and an Oxford quarterback. He joins ChinaTalk to discuss how
Second Breakfast: Iran, $500B for Defense...and should we pity RTX?
Bryan Clark joins.
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Transistor Radio: WFE and Doug's Claude Code Psychosis
but in a nice way
happy new year!
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Are We Cooked? Q1 2026
We check in on the state of the republic and allied scale with Peter Harrell, former Biden official and host of the excellent new Security Economics podcast, Kevin Xu, who writes the Interconnected newsletter, and Matt Klein, author of Trade Wars Are Class Wars and The Overshoot substack.
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Emergency Second Breakfast: Venezuela
The gang (Justin Mc, Tony Stark and Eric Robinson) and I talk about what the hell just happened this past weekend and what it all means.
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Japanese Economic Security Policy with A REAL LIFE METI OFFICIAL
Nishikawa Kazumi, Principal Director for Economic Security Policy at the legendary Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), joins China Talk. Cohosting is Charles Lichfield of the Atlantic Council.
Today, our conversation covers:
METI’s reputation as a juggernaut of industrial policy, and how the organization has evolved since the 1970s,
How Japan conceives of and pur
ChinaTalk 2025 Year in Review
ChinaTalk Audience survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScQ99GAL0m_8iBqZDiKoEjRZiyX6544QvaCNtd1cVkc826n7A/viewform?usp=dialogFeatured coverage on Substack:
Industrial diamonds: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/diamonds-are-a-trade-wars-best-friend
China’s influence in Central Asia: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/notes-on-kyrgyzstan
Taiwanese WWII veterans: https://www.chinatalk
Joe Weisenthal and I do a Show About Nothing
A festivus special!
Joe Weisenthal, host of Odd Lots and my podcast host alter ego, come to celebrate his ten years of hosting, reflect on the medium and China.
01:21 following your podcasting bliss
21:19 handling guests
26:06 china
46:04 journalism integrity
49:24 parenting in nyc
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Second Breakfast: Arctic Warfare Christmas Special!
Steve Gagnon joins the show!
Book: Thousand Mile War https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Mile-War-Aleutians-Classic-Reprint/dp/0912006838
Outtro music:
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Rahm Returns to Chat Trump and China: “He is the worst negotiator.”
Rahm Emanuel returns to ChinaTalk with a characteristically blunt assessment of U.S.-China relations, delivering an unsparing verdict on the first year of Donald Trump’s second term.
We discuss:
The “Fear Factor” in Asia: Why Japan and South Korea are ramping up defense spending not because of Trump’s strength, but because his unpredictability and isolationism have forced them to buy “insura
Détente 2.0 with Mike Froman of CFR
Mike Froman is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and former U.S. Trade Representative. He joins ChinaTalk for the first time to discuss:
Why his 1992 dissertation on détente is suddenly relevant again – and why “positive linkage” fails to change adversary behavior,
How mutual assured destruction has shifted from nuclear weapons to rare earths, supply chains, and technology,
Second Breakfast: Habemus NDAA!
We've got a full house with Tony, Justin and Eric today. We get into:
The hottest NDAA takes on the airwaves (DFC, OSC, AUKUS, Taiwan, contested logistics, Xi's money)
Tony has an amazing tv pitch for the deposed dictator White Lotus
SOCOM creatine and super soldiers
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Overfit: NeurIPS Vibes, Research Doesn't Matter, OpenAI Cooked?
Nathan and Jasmine debrief from NeurIPS San Diego, where we of course threw the best party.
outtro music: we're on a boat https://suno.com/s/dkulmuRvScACxObX
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Emergency Pod: H200s to China with Dmitri Alperovich
It's never over with Trump...Dmitri Alperovich of the Silverado Policy Accelerator comes on to discuss Trump's decision to allow the export of H200s to china.
outtro music, a fan song to Jameison Greer: https://suno.com/s/yTi5R7xDRcM7p2ho
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Second Breakfast: Trump's National Security Strategy + Hegseth's Second Strike
First half on the national security strategy you can read here https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf
26:18 we get into the second strike
Tony's Taiwan baseball podcast rec: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6s26btM3CFq7FgUUmdECST?si=gMIOtaZxSPKYzk5qCNMePQ
Kimi said I should set the song to veggietales, so I did. https://suno.com/s/P4XaZR6f1mphS
Helen Toner Takes the CSET Reins
It's think tank director week at ChinaTalk! Helen Toner of CSET kicks us off to talk through where she's planning on taking the storied organization.
her speech about jagged progress: https://helentoner.substack.com/p/taking-jaggedness-seriously
Outtro music: https://suno.com/s/HcdTS6W1OmHh8ZYz
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The Future of Secure Telecom
In the wake of Salt Typhoon, what does the future of secure telecom look like?
To find out, ChinaTalk interviewed John Doyle, a former Green Beret who spent a decade building Palantir’s national security practice before founding Cape, which calls itself “America’s privacy-first mobile carrier”. Also joining the conversation is Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman and co-founder of Silverado Policy Accele
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