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
ChinaTalkSecond Breakfast: Witkoff and Putin's Peace Deal
Eric Robinson, Justin Mc, Tony Stark and I talk China's sushi ban, Witkoff's peace plan, Jake Sullivan, William Manchester's absurd memoir Here's the full text…
ChinaTalkThe Z.ai Playbook
Zixuan Li is Director of Product and genAI Strategy at Z.ai (also known as Zhipu 智谱 AI). The release of their benchmark-topping flagship model, GLM 4.5, was…
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Jake Sullivan on Playing the Long Game
After five long years since his last ChinaTalk appearance, Jake Sullivan returns to the show! We discuss… Sullivan’s experience managing crises, implementing…
ChinaTalkSecond Breakfast: Acquisition Reform? Are We Really Doing It?
Justin and Eric cohost with Pete Modigliani and Matt McGregor, coauthors of the Defense Tech and Acquisition substack…
ChinaTalkOverfit: AI Lovers, Chinese Model Takeover, Vice Signalling, Hefei Model
Jasmine Sun (https://jasmi.news/), Nathan Lambert (https://www.interconnects.ai/), and special guest Afra Wang (https://afraw.substack.com/). Our article on…
ChinaTalkSecond Breakfast: Colby's Pigpen, Counter-UAS, Training, Eat like a Trumper (or Iranian Spy?)
we cooked better than cafe milano 00:00 Colby's trainwreck of a hearing + right wing DC food 16:42 Countering Drones 35:32 How to train seriously Guests…
ChinaTalkEMERGENCY POD: Tariffs on Trial
Peter Harrell and Oren Cass join the show to talk IEEPA at the Supreme Court and broader US grand strategy towards China. 03:01 IEPA Tariffs and Their…
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CCP Bureaucracies in War
Why do leaders with vast expert bureaucracies at their fingertips make devastating foreign policy decisions? Tyler Jost, professor at Brown, joins ChinaTalk to…
ChinaTalkSecond Breakfast: Xi-Trump, Taiwan Deterrence, Tibetan Buddhism, Antietam
Featuring the Kirsten and Charlotte Asdal alongside Tony (https://www.breakingbeijing.com/) Eric Robinson, Justin (https://justinmc.substack.com/) and myself…
ChinaTalkUkraine's Drone War with Shashank and Rob Lee
Joining the pod today are Rob Lee of FPRI, Shashank Joshi of the Economist, and Tony Stark of the Breaking Beijing substack. We discuss… Whether Ukraine…
ChinaTalkJapan's New Prime Minister: What to Expect
Tobias Harris of the Observing Japan substack returns to catch us up on the new Prime Minister. We get into what Takaichii's deal is, chart her rise to power…
ChinaTalkUkraine's Drone War with Shashank and Rob Lee
Joining the pod today are Rob Lee of FPRI, Shashank Joshi of the Economist, and Tony Stark of the Breaking Beijing substack. We discuss… Whether Ukraine…
ChinaTalkSecond Breakfast: Venezuela, Shutdowns, PE + Army, E.B. Sledge
Bryan, Eric, and Justin join the fun. 00:00 Venezuela 16:08 Shutdown Effects on Military Operations 34:45 The PE Army Takeover + Datacenters 46:32 Submarine…
ChinaTalkPLA Purges and How Xi Rules with Jon Czin
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…
ChinaTalkSecond Breakfast: Gaza, SOUTHCOM, AI Nuke Analogies Stink, Generals Using AI (with M. Horowitz and L. Kahn!)
Guests today include Michael Horowitz (Penn now, in the Biden years was DAS for Force Development and Emerging Capabilities + Director of the Emerging…
ChinaTalkTarun Chhabra on the Stakes of AI Competition
Tarun Chhabra is Head of National Security Policy at Anthropic, and previously served as the Deputy Assistant to the President and Coordinator for Technology…
ChinaTalkAnduril's Christian Brose on the Dangers of Unseriousness
Chrisian Brose is the Chief Strategy Officer at Anduril Industries. He’s been at the forefront of the debate about how America needs to change in order to win…
ChinaTalkEMERGENCY POD: China's Rare Earth Export Controls
Chris Miller (chip wars), Chris McGuire (10 year State Dpt vet, check out the past episode on the feed) and I discuss a big move by MOFCOM to squeeze Trump in…
ChinaTalkAI Hardware Net Assessment: Why Huawei Can't Beat Nvidia
Last week, Jensen Huang said that China is “nanoseconds behind” the US in chipmaking. Is he right? Today, Chris McGuire joins ChinaTalk for a US-China AI…
ChinaTalkSecond Breakfast: Putin's Drones, SecWar Patton, Wargaming, Finding Subs
Bryan Clark, a former submariner now with the Hudson Institute, joins the show! Outtro speech: George C. Scott's rendition of Patton's speech Learn more about…
ChinaTalkRAND's Jeff Alstott on How Facts Can Shape Tech Policymaking
At long last, Jeff Alstott, the fairy godfather of DC AI policy, joins the show. He’s the founding director for RAND’s center for technology and security…
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Transistor Radio: Intel, Dylan Falls in Love, Nvidia Captures Dylan, Slop City (our dumbest show yet)
for better or worse, the first ep on chinatalk feed I had to put an explicit tag on... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
ChinaTalkSecond Breakfast: The Future of Intelligence
Anthony Vinci, former CTO of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and author of the upcoming book The Fourth Intelligence Revolution, joins as Second…
ChinaTalkOverfit: Shenzhen vs SF Vibes, Model Progress, Jordan a Berkeley Bowl Hater
Jasmine Sun of https://jasmi.news/ and Nathan Lambert of https://www.interconnects.ai/ discuss a wide variety of topics of interest around AI and culture…
ChinaTalkSecond Breakfast: RIP China Hawks, NDAA, Innovation Kayfabe, Child Soldiers
back at it again Outtro Music: Boys of the Old Brigade, Wolf Tones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoQBXgbVVT4&ab_channel=rebelsongs Book…
ChinaTalkNate Silver on AI, Politics, and Power
Nate Silver writes Silver Bulletin and is the author of On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, now in paperback with a new foreword. In today’s…
ChinaTalkMP Materials, Intel, and Sovereign Wealth Funds
Uncle Sam is taking a bite out of companies left and right. Today, we’re going to focus on MP Materials — the Trump administration’s answer to China’s…
ChinaTalkSecond Breakfast: Department of War, Warrior Culture, Sicario, Dick Winters, SEALs in North Korea,
We're going weekly. Outtro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk18bFIgOS4&ab_channel=ThereIRuinedIt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit…
ChinaTalkThe Robotics Revolution
Ryan Julian is a research scientist in embodied AI. He worked on large-scale robotics foundation models at DeepMind and got his PhD in machine learning at USC…
ChinaTalkEmergency Pod: US-India-China Meltdown
Manoj Kewalramani of the Takshashila Institution and the Tracking People's Daily substack https://trackingpeoplesdaily.substack.com/ alongside James Crabtree…
ChinaTalkSecond Breakfast: Parades, U.S. Grant, JCIDS, Warbots
Our third defense pod, I guess we're really doing it now. Like and subscribe if you're just here for our Civil War coverage. Guests include: Tony Stark, Army…
ChinaTalkWar in the Pacific with Ian Toll
For the 80th anniversary of the Allied victory over Japan, ChinaTalk interviewed Ian Toll about his Pacific War trilogy, which masterfully brings America’s…
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Dan Wang on Modern China
Dan Wang at long last makes his solo ChinaTalk debut! We’re here to discuss and celebrate his first book, Breakneck. We get into… Engineering states vs…
ChinaTalkSecond Breakfast: Drones, Silicon Shield, Waymo, FedFest, Bolton
Israeli/Ukranian-style bolt from the blue drone attacks freak out Eric. I don't buy Silicon Shield. Lessons from Waymo on about the future of warfare…
ChinaTalkNVIDIA GPU Black Market Smuggling
Are GPUs being smuggled into China? Nvidia says no. But Steve Burke, editor in chief of Gamer Nexus, has traced out the entire smuggling chain in an epic…
ChinaTalkLearning from Ukraine, Preparing for Taiwan
Mick Ryan is a retired major general in the Australian army and author of three books — War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Great Power…
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Transistor Radio: H20, GPT5, DUI Lawyers, Ajinomoto
Jon, Doug, Dylan and Wei join the chat to talk export controls and GPT5. Books Doug and I like: Jonathan Spence's Search for Modern China Gavan Daws' Shoal of…
ChinaTalkEMERGENCY POD: H20s to China + 15% with Chris Miller and Lennart
So we're selling AI chips to China now. Chris Miller, author of Chip Wars, and Lennart Heim at RAND join to discuss: What are the tradeoffs involved in selling…
ChinaTalkSecond Breakfast: A New Defense Pod
We talk AGI nihilism in the Taiwan fight, combined arms breach, and Palmer Luckey's Taiwan speech. Part 2 explores Detachment 201, the evolution of the Office…
ChinaTalkDissent from Moscow to Beijing
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement — the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Professor Ben Nathans — is perhaps…
ChinaTalkBetting on Chaos: Professionals in Prediction Markets
What does it take to make a living betting on politics? Can prediction markets offer insights about the future that other analyses cannot? To find out…
ChinaTalkWhere Japan Goes Next
Tobias Harris of the Observing Japan substack https://observingjapan.substack.com/ joins to discuss the latest Japanese election, how we got here, and what…
ChinaTalkXi Zhongxun's Second Act: 1949-1989
This is part two of our series with Joseph Torigian, author of the definitive biography of Xi Zhongxun. This episode traces the inner world of a man navigating…
ChinaTalkTrump and Japan
Why has Japan fallen out of Trump’s good graces? Will Japan close a deal with the US before tariffs take effect? And how will the upcoming Japanese election…
ChinaTalkXi Zhongxun: The Party's Interests Come First
Joseph Torigian’s The Party’s Interest Comes First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping is a monumental scholarly achievement — easily a contender…
ChinaTalkOverfit: AI and Media, America's Deepseek, Plots
Nathan Lambert (https://www.interconnects.ai/), Jasmine Sun (https://jasmi.news/) and I kick off a new series 'Overfit' to talk how AI is shaping the future of…
ChinaTalkChina's Best Music of 2025 (So Far)
Jake Newby, author of the China music substack Concrete Avalanche, presents his official playlist of China’s best new music. It includes ADHD-inspired hip hop…
ChinaTalkWagner, Two Years On (Kamil on Coups and Power)
How does Russia prevent uprisings, and what can other authoritarians learn from Moscow’s methods of coup control? For the second anniversary of the Wagner…
ChinaTalkAre We Cooked? Q2 Check In
Is America cooked? We check in on what clarity the past three months have given us on the long term dynamic between the US and China. Guests include: Peter…
ChinaTalkDoug, Dylan and Jon on Lip-Bu, Labubu, AI Salaries, and Bees
Also, somehow, the Third Temple, twink human sacrifice for the AI labs, and the SemiAnalysis Desi Waifu 3000. Outtro Music (sounded like a let's get dylan a…
ChinaTalkApple in China
Patrick McGee is the author of Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. Our discussion led us through a detailed history of Apple’s…
ChinaTalkThe House of Huawei
Eva Dou is the author of The House of Huawei, an excellent book covering the personal, economic, and geopolitical arc of Huawei, China’s most important…
ChinaTalkCan Donors Save Science?
Renaissance Philanthropy — in my opinion, the most exciting S&T philanthropic venture in the US — is getting a one-year check-in. Kumar Garg first appeared on…
ChinaTalkJosh Wolfe on Elon v. Trump, R&D, Immigration
Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital joins ChinaTalk to talk: Elon, Trump and the tech right The future of the R&D base and importance of immigrants Why short videos…
ChinaTalkDylan, Doug, Jon on AI Mandate of Heaven + Ezra Beef
Two weeks in a row what has gotten into us. Jordan tries to save the NSF and immigrant visas with an AI researcher letter Our quarterly AI mandate of heaven…
ChinaTalkDoug, Dylan and Jon on Nvidia + Saudi/UAE
Dylan bonds with Nvidia's CFO and I try to keep the GPUs in actual democracies. Outtro Music: FaceTime, Karencici, 2018…
ChinaTalkMAGA-Mao Connections with Orville Schell
What can Mao Zedong teach us about Donald Trump? To find out, ChinaTalk interviewed the legendary sinologist Orville Schell, who visited China during the…
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The AI Attention War
Just how weird will the AI-powered future be? To discuss, ChinaTalk interviewed Nathan Lambert, who writes the Interconnects newsletter and researches AI at…
ChinaTalkWhy the US Needs a Department of Competitiveness
What does the future of industrial policy in America look like, and what state capacity investments are needed to get there? How does China factor into the…
ChinaTalkEzra, Derek, and Dan Wang on Abundance and China
Does anybody really understand China? Could America pursue an abundance agenda without the threat of the PRC? Can podcasters change the world? To discuss…