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
October 9, 2025 • 57 mins
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 advance of their APEC summit.
Outtro Music: Paul Simon, Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAb2Mu0CRk4
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October 8, 2025 • 88 mins
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 hardware net assessment. Chris spent a decade as a civil servant in the State Department, serving as Deputy Senior Director for Technology and National Security on the NSC during the Biden administration and back at State for the initial months of Trump 2.0.
Today, our conversat...
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October 6, 2025 • 61 mins
Bryan Clark, a former submariner now with the Hudson Institute, joins the show!
Outtro speech: George C. Scott's rendition of Patton's speech
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October 3, 2025 • 67 mins
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 policy, TASP, worked at NSC, NSF and IARPA, and has a PhD in complex networks.
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for better or worse, the first ep on chinatalk feed I had to put an explicit tag on...
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September 29, 2025 • 83 mins
Anthony Vinci, former CTO of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and author of the upcoming book The Fourth Intelligence Revolution, joins as Second Breakfast's first ever guest.
Outtro Music: Otis Redding, Something is Worrying Me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2ughAT80R8
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September 24, 2025 • 71 mins
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.
Outtro Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujC4p7mf0XE&ab_channel=Release-Topic
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September 19, 2025 • 67 mins
back at it again
Outtro Music: Boys of the Old Brigade, Wolf Tones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoQBXgbVVT4&ab_channel=rebelsongs
Book: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/child-soldiers-in-the-western-imagination/9780813563701/
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September 18, 2025 • 79 mins
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 conversation, we discuss…
Honesty, reputation, and paying the bills with writing,
Impact scenarios for the AI future, including how AI could impact elections and political decision-making,
The emerging synergy between prediction markets and journalism, and how Nate would bui...
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September 16, 2025 • 61 mins
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 restrictions on rare earth material exports to America.
To discuss, ChinaTalk interviewed Daleep Singh, former Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics, now with PGIN; Arnab Datta, currently at Employ America and IFP; and Peter Harrell, former Biden official and ...
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September 14, 2025 • 77 mins
We're going weekly.
Outtro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk18bFIgOS4&ab_channel=ThereIRuinedIt
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September 12, 2025 • 86 mins
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 in 2021. Follow him on X: @ryancjulian
In our conversation today, we discuss…
What makes a robot a robot, and what makes robotics so difficult,
The promise of robotic foundation models and strategies to overcome the data bottleneck,
Why full labor replacement is fa...
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September 8, 2025 • 62 mins
Manoj Kewalramani of the Takshashila Institution and the Tracking People's Daily substack https://trackingpeoplesdaily.substack.com/ alongside James Crabtree, author of Billionaire Raj, chat whatever the hell is happening in the trilateral relationship.
Outtro music: Chalte Chalte Title Song | Abhijeet, Alka Yagnik | Shah Rukh Khan, Rani Mukherjee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkOakcMqJ-8&ab_channel=T-SeriesBollywoodClassics
L...
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September 5, 2025 • 67 mins
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 vet who writes https://www.breakingbeijing.com/
Justin McIntosh, former Green beret who writes https://justinmc.substack.com/
Eric Robinson, lawyer and Army vet who spent time in OSC, JSOC and the NCTC
Outtro Music: After going through twenty different John Brow...
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August 31, 2025 • 118 mins
For the 80th anniversary of the Allied victory over Japan, ChinaTalk interviewed Ian Toll about his Pacific War trilogy, which masterfully brings America’s bloodiest war — and the world’s only nuclear war — to life. Ian’s detailed scholarship creates a multisensory historical experience, from the metallic tang of radiation after the bombs were dropped to the stench of Pacific battlefields.
Ian’s forthcoming book, The Freshwater Wa...
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August 28, 2025 • 76 mins
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 lawyerly societies,
The competing legacies of the 1980s in China, the decade which saw brutal repression via the One Child Policy and Tiananmen alongside intellectual debate, cultural vibrancy, and rock and roll,
Methods of knowing China, from the People’s Daily and Seek...
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August 24, 2025 • 54 mins
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.
Intertextual analysis of the Mick Ryan interview.
Fed Supernova, which is a terrible name for a conference, and counterintelligence.
Has John Bolton taken enough Ls already? I guess not.
Guests include:
Tony Stark, Army vet who writes https://www.breakingbeijing.com/
Jus...
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August 22, 2025 • 56 mins
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 three-hour YouTube documentary. He filmed another three-hour documentary exploring the impact of tariffs on America’s supply chain ecosystem.
In today’s conversation, we discuss…
Steve’s investigative process, including how he found people in mainland China willing to speak o...
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August 20, 2025 • 67 mins
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 Competition and Conflict, White Sun War, which is a piece of fiction about a near-future Taiwan war, and The War for Ukraine: Strategy and Adaptation Under Fire. He also writes the excellent Futura Doctrina Substack, which has taught me a tremendous amount over the past few years. T...
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August 14, 2025 • 63 mins
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 Time
Joseph Heinrich's The Secret of Our Success
Outtro Music: Europhia II from kkluv's new album https://open.spotify.com/track/61kEkWr0gQrcDwd6uIbxQ1?si=190526b87e96487c
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