ChinaTalk

Jordan Schneider
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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/

  1. 20 hr ago

    WarTalk: 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 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 that promotes its best plant manager to CFO — and why the people you'd actually want as leaders are quietly opting out The Green Light teams: the suicidal one-way logic of hand-delivered nuclear demolition, from the Fulda Gap to mountain passes in Iran The difference between a Ranger tab and the Ranger Regiment — and why "is he a real Ranger" is a perennial fight every time a candidate runs for Congress Battlefield medicine as live experimentation — walking blood banks, French plasma you had to sign a waiver for, and why a stateside paramedic needs a doctor's permission to do what a SOF medic does on instinct The tech-CEO-as-villain premise behind The Most Dangerous Man, Nick Land's archaeofuturism, and the disturbing real Sarajevo "safari" case winding through the Italian courts The SOF celebrity-industrial complex — Lone Survivor, Joe Rogan, Tim Kennedy, January 6th, and the cultural fallout of two failed wars we haven't begun to reckon with suno song: https://suno.com/s/Nw18Ns8p0CK9Blrd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1hr 10min

  2. 5 days ago

    Rare 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 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 weapon — How Beijing turned its dominance over rare earths into a tool of economic coercion and why the West is struggling to respond. 25 minerals that actually matter — Why policymakers should focus on the specific materials China can weaponize rather than spreading resources across broad critical mineral lists. Why subsidies alone won’t fix the problem — How China’s industrial policy, overcapacity, and ability to flood markets make it nearly impossible for Western supply chains to compete without coordinated action. Reshoring the industrial base — The tradeoffs behind rebuilding domestic capacity: higher end-product costs, environmental NIMBYism, skilled labor shortages, and the need for deeper US-European cooperation. The next resource race — How defense, AI, robotics, and energy demand are intensifying competition for critical materials and what the future of allied industrial power might look like. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1 hr

  3. 17 Jun

    AI 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: 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 why that's about to pay off Tools over ideas, from Warren Weaver's six instruments to the thousands at CERN who proved a Higgs boson three guys took home the Nobel for How do spend a billion dollars to save higher education AI, souls, and whether your Claude gets into heaven Suno song: https://suno.com/s/3Q11kw74vQmH7eLN Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    49 min

  4. 11 Jun

    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 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 voted down, and why markup days are the only two days a year the Senate acts like a functioning institution. We discuss… Why NDAA markup is the Senate's best two days of the year — and what it would take to make the rest of the institution work like that, The AI Guardrails Act, the Anthropic debate, and why no one SecDef or AI company should set the rules for the kill chain, Her bipartisan bill with Bernie Moreno banning Chinese connected vehicles — and the BYDs now streaming over the Canadian border, Why Michiganders care deeply about China but not (yet) about Taiwan, The Democratic playbook if the party flips a chamber in November, Data ownership, the Midwest's data center revolt, and why a healthy democracy would be talking about AI every single day. song: https://suno.com/s/HdtwRInfqQsDTVMq Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    32 min

  5. 8 Jun

    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 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 its finest. Equally impressive in different ways is his book, The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860 to 1914. Not only is it god-tier diplomatic history, it also gives you a feel for the era through its explorations of social, economic, domestic, political, and cultural dimensions of Anglo-German relations. There are fascinating US/China analogies that we’ll get into at some point in this podcast. His two most recent works directly inform the military coverage on China Talk. Engineers of Victory looks at how people and the systems they worked within solved engineering challenges that turned the tide for entire theaters in World War II. His latest, Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of Global Order in World War II, is a sweeping history of a radical transformation in the balance of military power, from the mid-1930s when America was just gaining prominence, to after World War II, when it had no other significant naval competitor. The Parliament of Man: A History of the United Nations first got me interested in international organizations and gave me my senior thesis topic about the creation of the UN. What Kennedy taught me more than anything is this: sweat the details, look at the individual players, and zoom out often enough to understand what truly shapes the long-term fate of nations. Over the course of this episode, we pick up themes from all across his work: Great Power rivalries of the late 19th-early 20th centuries and their echoes today, Why potential antagonisms turn nice and why others turn belligerent, The persistent struggles of liberal internationalists and why they rarely get the outcomes they want, How China today is not Germany of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, The surprising ways geography shapes global power dynamics, How fear spreads among nations and why mutual suspicion is so hard to escape, Why top powers blow it and lose their dominant place in the world, How systems and innovation win wars. And much more, including salutary lessons from the Dutch and Swedes on boring yet prosperous futures, how Churchill’s interest in gadgets influenced the course of the Second World War, and why transformative action from the UN remains unlikely in the near future. Note: we recorded this in 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1hr 19min

  6. 5 Jun

    WarTalk: 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 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.S. Africa Command and a 30-year career Special Forces officer, with command tours spanning 5th Special Forces Group, the anti-ISIS task force in Syria, and 1st Special Forces Command. He’s joined by ChinaTalk’s Justin, who served under Brennan as a young NCO in the Middle East. We discuss… How AFRICOM runs a counter-VEO away game on 0.1% of the defense budget by working “by, with, and through” partners “Putin’s Purse”: trafficking thousands of Africans onto the Ukrainian front lines under false pretenses The Houthi–al-Shabaab pipeline and the threat triangle around Djibouti’s PRC naval base Building an “alternate DIB in exile”: drone centers of excellence in Morocco, South African artillery, Namibian satellite radios Why Brennan wants to “declare jihad against proprietary data streams” and where AI actually helps a combatant commander decide WarTalk's first Ivorian dance party suno song: https://suno.com/s/1hhJTtwBn2NGR8eT Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1hr 3min

  7. 1 Jun

    The 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 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's claim that AI cannot truly "understand" is a narrow theological term of art, and why that nuance gets lost on Twitter Pope Leo's call to "disarm AI" and the Holy See's potential role mediating between the US and China and speaking for the global South Tim's pitch for a Vatican alignment lab that buys GPUs and tries to beat Anthropic's benchmarks from Christian first principles Why frontier-lab researchers, including non-believers, are treating the Pope as a moral coordinating signal How Anthropic drifting from deontology toward virtue ethics in training Claude looks like a validation of the Christian approach The provocation underneath all of it: is the American AI stack a Christian AI stack? pope as chicago footwork: https://suno.com/s/1Qb9Ce3Bh6saeF2V Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    51 min

  8. 29 May

    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 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 Republican tech lead on the House Select Committee on the CCP, with prior stints in OSD and as a surface warfare officer. We discuss… The GAIN AI and Overwatch acts: and Congress's most aggressive attempt to wrest export-control authority from the executive branch since the Cold War Why you can't just "buy AI": and why national security evals look nothing like the SWE benchmarks the labs optimize for Strategic-level evals :for problems you can't run ten times, from Iran negotiations to targeting at the COCOM level China's robot-army advantage: open-weight models at the edge, Ukraine-style drone iteration soaked up via Russia, and a casualty tolerance the US can't match The "no more NASA" problem: how risk tolerance, mission command, and law-of-armed-conflict constraints shape who wins the deployment race Breaking into tech policy: Ike's case for why every aspiring policy person should spend a year on the Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    49 min
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Hosts & Guests

About

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/

Information

  • Creator
    Jordan Schneider
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2026
  • Episodes
    541
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Jordan Schneider
  • Show Website
    ChinaTalk

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