Shows / ChinaTalk
ChinaTalk
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/
Episodes
ChinaTalkThe Manhattan Project, Take Two
In the new era of global competition, being at the forefront of Super Intelligence innovation equals geopolitical power. To maintain leadership and establish…
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What's Broken About China's Economy + The Cost of Keeping China Out | Meg Rithmire
ChinaTalk spends a lot of time on the leading lights of the Chinese economy... the MiniMaxes, ByteDances, Unitrees, and BYDs of the world. But what about the…
ChinaTalkWarTalk: Kofman on Starlink + What Ukraine Can Teach the U.S. Military
Ukraine and Russia have rebuilt their armies around drones, deception, and long-range strike. What should the U.S. military take from it? Michael Kofman joins…
ChinaTalkThe MATCH Act and China’s DUV Imports
Nick Brown is a co-founder of the Center for Technology and Statecraft (CTS), a new think tank spun out of IFP, that looks at long-term technology challenges…
ChinaTalkDrone Dominance | Travis Metz - DIU Acting Director
He was recently promoted to DIU’s acting director after spending the past year running the Drone Dominance Program. Co-hosting are Brian Clark, senior fellow…
ChinaTalkWhy a Chinese AI Lab’s Product Lead Thinks AGI is “Inevitable” | Richard Bian
Richard Bian is the head of product operations for Ant Ling, the foundational LLM at Ant. If you don’t know Ant, they most famously make Alipay, which makes…
ChinaTalkFrom Posting to Policy: Saif Khan on DUV and the AI Balance
Saif Khan makes his ChinaTalk debut. He is perhaps my favorite example of posting-to-policy that I’ve seen over the course of my time following Washington…
ChinaTalkMatt Yglesias + Jerusalem Demsas + Jordan Crossover Pod
I join Matt and Jerusalem for an unhinged conversation (most entertaining of the year?) about China, AI, corruption, politics, and various other things. Check…
ChinaTalkAGI Believers: Kevin Roose on the Race
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…
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Data is the Hard Part | Building AI Tools for the Military
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…
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WarTalk: AutoWarCom + Project Meridian
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…
ChinaTalkSection 301 and the Spice Man who Sued Trump Over Them
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…
ChinaTalkChina's Economy is Broken | Logan Wright
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…
ChinaTalkWarTalk: Potemkin Pacific, Midterm Budget Woes
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…
ChinaTalkJulian Gewirtz on Trump-Xi Summit, AI, and Mao Dead Fifty Years Ago!
Julian Gewirtz, author and former Biden NSC China director, joins ChinaTalk days before Xi Jinping’s first White House visit since 2015. With little…
ChinaTalkCan AI Beat the Pentagon’s Bureaucracy?
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…
ChinaTalkWarTalk: PLA, 2027, Nukes, and the Pivot to Asia Pirouette
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…
ChinaTalkModelTalk: Pacing the Frontier
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…
ChinaTalkWarTalk: 9.11, Death of the Army, So Long Dan Driscoll
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…
ChinaTalkWarTalk: GWOT at 25 with Wesley Morgan
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…
ChinaTalkCyber Apocalypse, Now? Hugging Face and the Future of Cyber Risk
OpenAI models mid-training broke out of their sandbox, hacked internal infrastructure, and eventually compromised Hugging Face — the first headline-grade AI…
ChinaTalkWarTalk: USN Readiness Reckoning, Steampunk Navy, and AI Cyberwar with Shashank of the Economist
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…
ChinaTalkHow AI Becomes a Political Crisis
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…
ChinaTalkLessons from the American Civil War
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!…
ChinaTalkNorth Korea's Messiah
Why is North Korea so weird? Is it Stalinism? Maoism? Japan-style emperor worship? Ancient Korean hermit kingdom energy? No, argues Jonathan Cheng, Beijing…
ChinaTalkThe Rise of China’s Electric Vehicle Industry
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…
ChinaTalkChina's Best Music in 2026 (So Far)
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…
ChinaTalk$75k Contest Launch! ChinaTalk Hiring + Evals for the Situation Room
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…
ChinaTalkWarTalk: Out of Ammo for Real + Are CCAs Dumb?
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…
ChinaTalkThe FCC's New Robot Rules
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…
ChinaTalkJordan talks AI with Sebastian Mallaby on his show 'The Spillover'
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…
ChinaTalkWarTalk: Odyssey Edition
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…
ChinaTalkThe Iran War Oil Shock That Wasn’t...(Yet?)
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…
ChinaTalkWarTalk: Iran War Back On, Rogue AI, Ukraine Civ-Mil
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…
ChinaTalkKimi K3, Xi's Speech, and China's Mythos Moment
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…
ChinaTalkWarTalk: Ancient Greece Edition!
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…
ChinaTalkChina's Mythos Moment
Claude Mythos scrambled American AI policy, leaving us with what Dean Ball calls a de facto involuntary licensing regime from the administration that promised…
ChinaTalkWarTalk: Iran + Randy Schriver on Asian Defense
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…
ChinaTalkThe Chemicals Powering the Chip Industry
We cover: How the Iran War has exposed vulnerabilities in the semiconductor industry’s chemical supply chains. The chemistry behind chip manufacturing — why…
ChinaTalkUnitree 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…
ChinaTalkTaiwan'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…
ChinaTalkWarTalk: 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…
ChinaTalkEconomic 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…
ChinaTalkRare 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…
ChinaTalkWarTalk 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…
ChinaTalkAI 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…
ChinaTalkEmergency 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…
ChinaTalkModelTalk: 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 Learn…
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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…
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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…
ChinaTalkWarTalk: 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…
ChinaTalkThe 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…
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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…
ChinaTalkArizona'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…
ChinaTalkWarTalk: 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…
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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…
ChinaTalkTrump'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…
ChinaTalkThe 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…
ChinaTalkWarTalk: 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…
ChinaTalk(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…