ChinaTalk

Matt Yglesias + Jerusalem Demsas + Jordan Crossover Pod Oct 12, 2026 4060 I join Matt and Jerusalem for an unhinged conversation (most entertaining of the year?) about China, AI, corruption, politics, and various other things. Check out their show The Argument, it's good. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

AGI Believers: Kevin Roose on the Race Oct 8, 2026 4252 Kevin Roose, formerly of the New York Times and Hard Fork, joins ChinaTalk to discuss AGI Chronicles, his new history of OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, and the people who believed in AGI long before it was cool and could make you trillions. Kevin is launching his own show, Machine Gods, later this October. We discuss… Why AGI was built on belief, not just money, GPUs, or talent, and how Google

Data is the Hard Part | Building AI Tools for the Military Oct 6, 2026 2561 Everyone wants AI that wins wars. Very few people want to collect, label, store, and test the data it runs on. Bharat Patel is currently Accenture’s AI and data lead for its defense portfolio, a former enlisted Navy sailor, and a veteran of the Army acquisition world, with experience at MITRE and across the Department of Defense. We’re here today to talk about why data is the hard part in making

WarTalk: AutoWarCom + Project Meridian Oct 5, 2026 3331 It's a new fiscal year with no new budget, and the Pentagon has a fresh batch of proposals. Two stand out: a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, built to buy and field autonomous weapons fast, and Project Meridian, a future-of-warfare panel made up of Elon, Palmer, Newt, and Emil Michael. Is either the right way to transform the force? Arthur Tellis, Senior Technology Fellow at the Institute

Section 301 and the Spice Man who Sued Trump Over Them Oct 2, 2026 3914 In February, the Supreme Court ruled Trump's IEEPA tariffs illegal. So why is everyone still paying them? Because the administration rebuilt them: first under Section 122, then under Section 301, and now the 301 tariffs are in court too. So ChinaTalk's series on the people suing the U.S. government over tariffs continues. Ethan Frisch is the co-founder of Burlap & Barrel, a single-origin spice

China's Economy is Broken | Logan Wright Sep 29, 2026 5282 After the global financial crisis, China added a third of global GDP to its bank assets in just eight years... the largest single-country credit expansion in at least a century. Today investment is contracting, growth is less than a percent, and the financial system that fueled China's growth is now the thing holding it back. Logan Wright, partner at Rhodium Group and my former boss, joins Chin

WarTalk: Potemkin Pacific, Midterm Budget Woes Sep 25, 2026 4348 WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan. We discuss… The Potemkin Pacific — why Paparo has half the planet on his map and nothing to fight with, and how the Iran blockade became the status quo The midterm budget squeeze — what a Democratic Senate means for the defense topline, why Anduril won’t keep working at risk, and how a ship

Julian Gewirtz on Trump-Xi Summit, AI, and Mao Dead Fifty Years Ago! Sep 22, 2026 3974 Julian Gewirtz, author and former Biden NSC China director, joins ChinaTalk days before Xi Jinping’s first White House visit since 2015. With little substantive agenda on the table, what is the US getting in exchange for the symbolism and pageantry of a state visit? We discuss: Trump-Xi summit scenarios, Beijing’s management of uncertainty and protocol, and how the script of US-China diplomac

Can AI Beat the Pentagon’s Bureaucracy? Sep 22, 2026 2973 Garrett Berntsen was last seen on ChinaTalk in his role as Deputy CDAO at the State Department. He then went to the Department of Defense for a little bit, and now makes a return in his new role as Chief AI Officer at Accenture Federal Services. We’re going to talk about what the national security community needs — beyond just API access to wonderful models — in order to really change how it does

WarTalk: PLA, 2027, Nukes, and the Pivot to Asia Pirouette Sep 19, 2026 4644 In the deserts of western China sit 320 brand-new missile silos, and for a while, by the Pentagon's account, some of them simply didn't work. The gap between the PLA on paper and the PLA in practice is where Gerald C. Brown has spent his career. Gerald is two weeks out of government, where he covered Chinese nuclear strategy and the PLA Rocket Force at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligenc

ModelTalk: Pacing the Frontier Sep 15, 2026 4096 ModelTalk regulars Nathan Lambert, who writes Interconnects, and writer Jasmine Sun join to work through a week in which Dario asked the industry to slow down and Trump called the whole thing a conspiracy. Why the Hugging Face hack broke through where years of extinction talk didn’t, and how Bernie, Tucker, and Rogan ended up on the same side What “pacing” even means: Nathan’s case that n

WarTalk: 9.11, Death of the Army, So Long Dan Driscoll Sep 11, 2026 4263 In the week of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Secretary of the Army walked into the White House, told the president the force is breaking, and quit. Days earlier his boss had fired the Chief of Staff, disbanded the Army's only drone battalion, and cashiered Chris Donahue — the last man out of Kabul. Bryan Clark, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan for a hosts-only edition marking a qua

WarTalk: GWOT at 25 with Wesley Morgan Sep 5, 2026 4871 Twenty-five years after 9/11, the Pech Valley represents the war in miniature: outposts meant to shield Afghan villages that instead drew the fighting to their doorsteps, built for reasons nobody manning them could explain. Wesley Morgan spent a decade finding out why. Wesley Morgan is the author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley, winner of the 2022 C

Cyber Apocalypse, Now? Hugging Face and the Future of Cyber Risk Sep 2, 2026 4253 OpenAI models mid-training broke out of their sandbox, hacked internal infrastructure, and eventually compromised Hugging Face — the first headline-grade AI breakout, and one that safety researchers saw coming. Is the cyber apocalypse finally on the calendar, or does the industry just need to do its homework? Joshua Saxe spent his formative years as a DARPA and NSA contractor before four years at

WarTalk: USN Readiness Reckoning, Steampunk Navy, and AI Cyberwar with Shashank of the Economist Aug 29, 2026 3845 The USS Abraham Lincoln is coming home after a deployment that stretched past 240 days, and the bill is about to come due: mechanical failures, rations down to the emergency stores, 20,000 unfilled billets at sea, and a maintenance backlog funneling into the one carrier repair yard on each coast. Meanwhile, the White House wants to tear the electromagnetic catapults out of the Ford class and put s

How AI Becomes a Political Crisis Aug 24, 2026 4115 The political economy of AI — things are getting weird, it seems. We have models on the loose, open weights being dropped from the heavenly temple, and data center protests fanning out across the land. There’s a lot of salience in a way that feels really different than it did even six months ago. To discuss, we have the wonderful Anton Leicht, a fellow at Carnegie and author of the excellent Subst

Lessons from the American Civil War Aug 21, 2026 5530 Note: This episode was recorded in late 2024. Luckily, there haven't been any US Civil War updates since then, so the episode's content still holds up. Enjoy! During paternity leave, the new influx of dad energy compelled me to read close to 15 titles on the American Civil War. The Civil War is a case study in traditional ChinaTalk themes like technological change and organizational design. It i

North Korea's Messiah Aug 19, 2026 7152 Why is North Korea so weird? Is it Stalinism? Maoism? Japan-style emperor worship? Ancient Korean hermit kingdom energy? No, argues Jonathan Cheng, Beijing bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal and author of The Korean Messiah: The Failed Dynasty That Shaped the Hermit Kingdom. You’ve all been sleeping on the influence of 19th-century American revival Protestantism. To discuss why Kim Il-sung

The Rise of China’s Electric Vehicle Industry Aug 17, 2026 6855 How did China grow its EV industry? Hint: it wasn’t really central planning from Beijing. It was a magical concoction of entrepreneurs and local officials using their guanxi to dance around giant SOEs and central-government regulation, leverage private and foreign capital, and just be really excellent business people. That’s led to our situation in 2026 — world-beating companies that have a ton of

China's Best Music in 2026 (So Far) Aug 14, 2026 3252 Jake Newby is the author of the Concrete Avalanche Substack, which covers the best music coming out of China. If you enjoy this playlist, check out Jake’s sets from 2025, 2024, and 2023, as well as his Chinese shoegaze feature. Tracklist: 1. ‘Undercurrent’ — Pu Poo Platter — from Undercurrent 2. ‘忧郁干杯乐园’ — the three mice — from where is my mice? 3. ‘错过的提醒’ — Lygort Quartet — from Through Voo

$75k Contest Launch! ChinaTalk Hiring + Evals for the Situation Room Aug 10, 2026 2912 Contest links: General $50k https://www.chinatalk.media/p/50k-chinatalk-submission-hiring-contest we're looking at submissions on a rolling basis! AI evals: Due Over the past few years, we’ve seen hints of policymakers and national leaders using AI models in their actual policy decision-making. The Prime Minister of Sweden said he uses it for second opinions on policy; the German Chancellor is

WarTalk: Out of Ammo for Real + Are CCAs Dumb? Aug 7, 2026 4674 Six months into the war with Iran, the United States has fired 850 Tomahawks, emptied its LRASM and JASSM-ER inventories, expended essentially every ATACMS and PrSM in the arsenal, and burned through the SM-6 and PAC-3 interceptors it had been stockpiling for a fight with China. The administration's position is that the munitions are fine and the people saying otherwise are committing treason. Br

The FCC's New Robot Rules Aug 6, 2026 3104 The FCC has spent the past year quietly rewiring the American import market, first routers, then drones, next undersea cables, and as of last week, robots. Adam Chan is national security counsel and senior advisor to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, and directs the agency’s new Council on National Security. He previously clerked on the Second Circuit and served as a national security legal fellow for t

Jordan talks AI with Sebastian Mallaby on his show 'The Spillover' Aug 1, 2026 4803 Don't sorry I put two ChinaTalk Records songs at the end! their show notes: On this episode of The Spillover, Sebastian Mallaby sits down with Jordan Schneider of ChinaTalk to unpack a frantic month in artificial intelligence. The conversation turns on whether the U.S. can actually “win” the AI race, with Schneider arguing that the most durable competitive edge will com

WarTalk: Odyssey Edition Jul 30, 2026 5312 Roel Konijnendijk of Oxford returns to talk Nolan's Odyssey, ancient PTSD, siege warfare, and the choices we'd all make in adapting. Justin McIntosh cohosts. YoungBoy Never Broke Again as well as James Blake each deliver an outtro song! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Iran War Oil Shock That Wasn’t...(Yet?) Jul 26, 2026 3960 The biggest oil shock in modern history came and went without the catastrophe everyone expected. When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, analysts warned that oil could hit $200 a barrel, but the global economy avoided that fate. The Trump administration has argued that the crisis was contained thanks to their aggressive action, but they may be taking the wrong lessons from the avoidance of that ap

WarTalk: Iran War Back On, Rogue AI, Ukraine Civ-Mil Jul 24, 2026 3839 Five months into the Iran campaign, the US has two carrier strike groups parked in the Arabian Sea, a blockade that may take months to bite, and a daisy chain of tankers stretching thousands of miles because there is no longer any fuel or food to buy inside the Gulf. Now the Houthis have entered the chat and declared their own blockade of the Bab el-Mandeb. Just the OG crew with Bryan Clark, seni

Kimi K3, Xi's Speech, and China's Mythos Moment Jul 22, 2026 3580 The whole ChinaTalk gang gets together to discuss a big week in China AI with the release of Kimi K3 and Xi talking open source and safety at WAIC. We also discuss our latest article exploring the three potential scenarios for Chinese governance when they really get their Mythos moment (you can read here: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/chinas-mythos-moment-366). song: Learn more about your ad ch

WarTalk: Ancient Greece Edition! Jul 21, 2026 7228 What do actual historians think about the Thucydides Trap? Does our 'low T' discourse all just come back to the movie 300? How the did ancient Greeks fight and why does Homer still keep us coming back 2700 years later? To discuss we have on the excellent Roel Konijnendijk, professor at Oxford and author of Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. Tony Stark and Justin McIntosh join. Le

China's Mythos Moment Jul 15, 2026 4228 Claude Mythos scrambled American AI policy, leaving us with what Dean Ball calls a de facto involuntary licensing regime from the administration that promised us the opposite. Zhipu's cofounder says China will have a Mythos-class model before the end of the year; IAPS says February 2027. Either way, Beijing is about to face down the same question, but unlike Washington, it already has a form to fi

WarTalk: Iran + Randy Schriver on Asian Defense Jul 10, 2026 3767 Beijing just announced a persistent Coast Guard patrol east of Taiwan, the administration is calling arms sales a "bargaining chip," and the NDS doesn't mention Taiwan at all. Is deterrence in the Strait quietly coming apart? Randy Schriver is Chairman of the Institute for Indo-Pacific Security (the successor to Project 2049), current chair of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission,

The Chemicals Powering the Chip Industry Jul 7, 2026 4729 We cover: How the Iran War has exposed vulnerabilities in the semiconductor industry’s chemical supply chains. The chemistry behind chip manufacturing — why advanced semiconductors depend on toxic, explosive, and highly reactive chemicals and why some are purified to levels measured in parts per trillion. How China went from virtually no semiconductor-gas industry to the ability t

Unitree and the Humanoid Robot Revolution Jul 4, 2026 3147 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!] Jun 30, 2026 4513 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 Jun 26, 2026 4178 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! Jun 24, 2026 4778 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? Jun 22, 2026 3574 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 Jun 19, 2026 4671 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! Jun 17, 2026 2966 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? Jun 15, 2026 4205 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 Jun 12, 2026 3345 Nathan Lambert of https://www.interconnects.ai/, Jasmine Sun of https://jasmi.news/, and guest Ethan Ding of https://ethanding.substack.com/ check in Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sen. Slotkin on NDAA, AI Nukes, Chinese Cars, and Taiwan Jun 11, 2026 1911 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 Jun 8, 2026 4720 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 Jun 5, 2026 3794 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 Jun 1, 2026 3050 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 May 29, 2026 2926 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 May 28, 2026 3555 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 May 26, 2026 4166 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 May 22, 2026 3369 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 May 18, 2026 4073 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 May 12, 2026 4791 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 May 9, 2026 4828 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 May 7, 2026 4692 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! Apr 30, 2026 3774 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 Apr 27, 2026 4479 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? Apr 24, 2026 3492 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 Apr 23, 2026 1501 outtro music: Pardon Pen! https://suno.com/s/2tXSJ7uJFA7k1pUC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Quantum 101 Apr 20, 2026 4382 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 Apr 17, 2026 3738 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) Apr 16, 2026 4080 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 Apr 12, 2026 3429 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...) Apr 10, 2026 3790 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 Apr 7, 2026 3860 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 Apr 3, 2026 4269 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 Apr 1, 2026 3502 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! Mar 27, 2026 3554 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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Second Breakfast: We Negotiate with Bombs, War by Brainrot Mar 25, 2026 3197 Full house with Bryan, Eric, Tony and Justin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Overfit is now ModelTalk! GPU Smuggling, OpenAI Cooked? + Open Models, AI Writing Mar 23, 2026 2471 Nathan Lambert of https://www.interconnects.ai/ and Jasmine Sun of https://jasmi.news/ catch up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Second Breakfast: Taking Kharg Island, Terrorism, Grift Mar 20, 2026 4731 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 Mar 19, 2026 2011 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 Mar 16, 2026 7167 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 Mar 13, 2026 4172 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 Mar 12, 2026 3034 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 Mar 9, 2026 3416 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 Mar 6, 2026 4545 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Autonomous Weapons 101 + Anthropic v DoW Mar 5, 2026 2453 Mike Horowitz, Penn Professor and Biden DoD official who wrote 3000.09, clears up some autonomous weapons misconceptions! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emergency Pod: Iran + Anthropic Mar 2, 2026 4799 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 Feb 27, 2026 5022 what a mess! Wario Amodei's slow jam vibe: https://suno.com/s/cf3KDdVQ5F0KCjow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lawrence Freedman on Strategy and Nuclear War Feb 25, 2026 5665 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! Feb 20, 2026 2042 Peter Harrell drops in, attorney who served in the Obama and Biden admins and submitted a brief in this case Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episodes

Recommended