ChinaTalk

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...

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...

outtro music: Pardon Pen! https://suno.com/s/2tXSJ7uJFA7k1pUC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 quantum...

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 classified work in per...

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 on the ri...

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, joi...

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 forgotten how to fig...

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 gro...

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 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 rise of th...

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