ChinaTalk

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,...

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 to supply almost e...

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 decouple c...

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 — how made-in-T...

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 company tha...

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 and of...

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 mineral...

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 regime lea...

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 bug, and w...

Chris McGuire, former civil servant in State and the Biden White House now at CFR, talk about the export control craziness of these past two weeks. We discuss: The 5:21 PM letter that took the world's most powerful model offline Why the "let it rip" administration pivoted to mandatory AI regulation overnight The incoherent export-control regime: regs that still say one thing while policy says anot...

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

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...

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...

Africa is the literal center of the world’s map and increasingly the center of gravity for ISIS, the manpower source for Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the contested geopolitical ground where China builds bases and drops off free weapons. Our first active-duty guest pulls back the curtain on a combatant command that runs on 0.1% of the defense budget. LTG John W. Brennan Jr. is Deputy Commander of U...

Pope Leo has called AI the single greatest challenge facing humanity. Not war, not poverty, not climate change. So we got a panel together to sort out what this encyclical means. Joining Jordan are Tim Hwang, deputy director of the Institute for Christian Machine Intelligence, John-Clark Levin of Kurzweil Technologies, and ChinaTalk's resident Catholic, Aqib Zakaria. We discuss… Why the encyclical...

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 Republi...

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 stakeho...

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...

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 Hori...

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...

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 mission and...

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 hea...

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...

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 using JAS...

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-transistor" — a...