ChinaTalk

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 aren't terrible after all? Philanthropy and books Read the social history of the machine gun! Outtro Music: Youba by The Sway Machinery and Khaira Arby https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYNUm4UfoAs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone...

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 update (there's been alot of movement!) Dylan makes bad slop jokes The Ezra Klein/Dylan Patel beef begins We recommend the amazing book Mitsui: Three Centuries of Japanese Business Outtro music: באמפרים” (pronounced Bam-pe-rim, roughly “Bumper...

Dylan bonds with Nvidia's CFO and I try to keep the GPUs in actual democracies. Outtro Music: FaceTime, Karencici, 2018. https://open.spotify.com/track/2PNDZp0ultOJrQL4AVENPO?si=46cdf72cdffb40a3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What can Mao Zedong teach us about Donald Trump? To find out, ChinaTalk interviewed the legendary sinologist Orville Schell, who visited China during the Cultural Revolution and is currently at the Asia Society. We discuss… Mao Zedong’s psychology and political style, Similarities and differences between Mao and Trump, How Mao-era traumas reverberate in modern China, including how the Cultural Rev...

Just how weird will the AI-powered future be? To discuss, ChinaTalk interviewed Nathan Lambert, who writes the Interconnects newsletter and researches AI at the Allen Institute. We get into… Why OpenAI is trending toward engagement farming and sycophancy, The state of Chinese AI innovation six months post-DeepSeek, and the factors influencing diffusion of Chinese vs American models, Meta’s organiz...

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 future of the U.S. semiconductor industry? And what do government affairs offices at large technology firms actually do? To explore these questions, we’re concluding our CSIS Chip Chat series with Bruce Andrews. Bruce has had a long career on C...

Does anybody really understand China? Could America pursue an abundance agenda without the threat of the PRC? Can podcasters change the world? To discuss, ChinaTalk interviewed Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, who need no introduction, as well as Dan Wang, who has written beautiful annual letters and is back in the US as a research fellow at Kotkin’s Hoover History Lab. He has an excellent book call...

Can China use military force to achieve its political goals, without triggering nuclear war? To find out, ChinaTalk interviewed Fiona Cunningham, a professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the new book, Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security. Co-hosting today is Michael Horowitz, another Penn professor who served in...

What has happened in the past 100 days to America’s science and technology ecosystem? What are China's ambitions and how is the government trying to take advantage of American uncertainty? And what can we learn from China's war mobilization exercises? To explore these questions, we're joined by Divyansh Kaushik and Alex Rubin, who both work at Beacon Global Strategies. Divyansh holds an AI PhD fro...

What is Trump doing to extended deterrence? I got Polymarket to create a market on whether a US ally will acquire nuclear weapons in 2025. It’s currently trading at 8%. Are we buyers or sellers? To discuss, ChinaTalk interviewed Vipin Narang, professor at MIT, who served as Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense responsible for nuclear deterrence policy during the Biden administration; Pranay Vaddi...

Rush Doshi (CFR, Biden NSC, author of the excellent The Long Game) and I run through the US-China tale of the tape. The future of America's relationship with its allies may be the key hinge variable for whether this century turns out to be China's to define. Do give this one a listen. Especially if you're JD Vance! See Rush's Foreign Affairs article with Kurt Campbell here: https://archive.is/ZSTK...

Bill Reinsch of CSIS and the Trade Guys podcast with Jay Goldberg of Digits and Dollars and the Circuit podcast join to dicuss Trump's tariff impact on semis on another CSIS-ChinaTalk Chip Chat! Bill lays out the four clashing instincts driving policy in MAGA 2.0: revenge for decades of perceived slights, a bargaining bluff to coerce concessions, a fast‑cash revenue grab, and a fantasy of instant...

Dylan Patel is a man on a mission. We get into how: Huawei is giving NVIDIA a run for their money What USG needs to do about it What smart semiconductor tariff policy would look like o3 Outtro Music, a little texas country for you all: Ernest Tubb, Walking the Floor Over You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQIRRReZIls Hank Thompson, Wild Side of Life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPvARPfquPc And...

Does America still have what it takes to stand up to China? Does short-term military readiness trade off with long-term strategy? What does the US need to do today to stay competitive for the rest of the century? “Tony Stark” is the author of Breaking Beijing, a Substack examining the military dimensions of US-China competition. Tony’s Substack goes deep on subjects you didn’t know you needed to u...

Doug gives his "we're heading for the end of the dollar-based world order" take. Dylan has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to macro or politics. We fail to arrive at the 2011 Obama-Boehner deal. I had a fever during the recording so don't really talk. 1930s-energy outtro music: Victoria Spivey, Detroit Moan, 1936 https://open.spotify.com/track/7L3GgSuguDJXi1msw6Pe7W?si=ab99d3eea65647...

Kevin Xu of https://interconnect.substack.com/, Matt Klein of https://theovershoot.co/, and Peter Harrell, Biden's U.S. White House as senior director for international economics in 2021-2022 and host of the new https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/security-economics/id1794022711 podcast join the show to discuss whether America's cooked. Outtro Music: Madeleine Chartrand - Tout Doucement, 1975 ht...

Tanner Greer of Scholar's Stage and I try to make sense of Liberation Day, the intellectual underpinnings of Trump's team, and what it all means for the world. Tanner's report: https://www.fpri.org/article/2025/03/obscurity-by-design/ Outtro Music: Nobody but You Babe, Clarence Reid, 1969 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCT7w2t8cyY 01:23 Geopolitical Implications of Trump's Management Style 35:02 ...

Welcome to part two of our series on Cold War history with Sergey Radchenko. Here’s part one. In today’s interview, we discuss… Khrushchev’s removal from power and the transition to the Brezhnev era, How the USSR and China managed their relationships with Vietnam, Sino-Soviet border conflicts, Brezhnev’s negative feelings toward China, and Nixon’s rapprochement, Watergate and the inability of Chin...

Is there a stable state the US and China can hope for on the road to AGI? To discuss we have on today Dan Hendrycks. A CS PhD, Dan runs the Center for AI Safety and is an advisor at xAI and Scale AI. Here's his superintelligence strategy: https://www.nationalsecurity.ai/ For some more direct lessons from the Cold War to today's US-China dynamics, check out the show I did with Hal Brands (https://w...

The Transistor Radio boys are back. Jon of Asianometry, Doug O'Laughlin and Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis on the pod to talk about Google's AI push, Intel's new CEO, Chinese robots, and the rise of CoreWeave. Here's the article rating the clouds that SemiAnalysis wrote: https://semianalysis.com/2025/03/26/the-gpu-cloud-clustermax-rating-system-how-to-rent-gpus/ Outtro Music: Some Malaysian UK garage...

Sergey Radchenko’s book, To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Bid for Global Power, is a masterwork! In my mind, it’s in pole position for best book of 2025. Sergey takes you into the mind of Soviet and Chinese leaders as they wrestle for global power and recognition, leaving you amused, inspired, and horrified by the small-mindedness of the people who had the power to start World War III. We get amazi...

Despite leading the world in AI innovation, there’s no guarantee that America will rise to meet the challenge of AI infrastructure. Specifically, the key technological barrier for data center construction within the next 5 years is new power capacity. To discuss policy solutions, ChinaTalk interviewed Ben Della Rocca, who helped write the AI infrastructure executive order and formerly served as di...

A Wuhan-developed AI agent went viral this weekend. Guests Rohit Krishnan of the substack Strange Loop Canon, Shawn Wang of Latent Space, and Dean Ball of Mercatus and Hyperdimensional join us to discuss. We get into What Manus is and isn't What Manus tells us about the broader AI ecosystem's ability to produce products we actually want to use The political economy and liability issues that AI age...

Note: This episode was recorded Wednesday February 26th, two days before Zelenskyy's press conference with J.D. Vance and Trump in the White House. Shashank Joshi (Defence Editor at The Economist) and Michael Horowitz (Biden's Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Development and Emerging Capabilities, now back at Penn) come on the show to discuss: Ukraine's Chances on the Battlefield: W...

Can sanctions really work? What lessons can we draw from US sanctions on Iran, Russia, and China in the 21st century? To find out, we interviewed Eddie Fishman, a former civil servant at the Department of State and an Adjunct Professor at Columbia. His new book, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, is a gripping history of the past 20 years of American sanctions policy. In t...