AGI Believers: Kevin Roose on the Race
Kevin Roose, formerly of the New York Times and Hard Fork, joins ChinaTalk to discuss AGI Chronicles, his new history of OpenAI, Anthropic,...
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ChinaTalk
Conversations exploring China's tech scene, economy and politics. Guests include a wide range of policy analysts, business professionals, journalists, and academics. Hosted by Jordan Schneid...
Episodes
20 of 574 episodesData is the Hard Part | Building AI Tools for the Military
Everyone wants AI that wins wars. Very few people want to collect, label, store, and test the data it runs on. Bharat Patel is currently Acc...
WarTalk: AutoWarCom + Project Meridian
It's a new fiscal year with no new budget, and the Pentagon has a fresh batch of proposals. Two stand out: a four-star Autonomous Warfare Co...
Section 301 and the Spice Man who Sued Trump Over Them
In February, the Supreme Court ruled Trump's IEEPA tariffs illegal. So why is everyone still paying them? Because the administration rebuilt...
China's Economy is Broken | Logan Wright
After the global financial crisis, China added a third of global GDP to its bank assets in just eight years... the largest single-country cr...
WarTalk: Potemkin Pacific, Midterm Budget Woes
WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan. We discuss… The Potemkin Pacific — why Pa...
Julian Gewirtz on Trump-Xi Summit, AI, and Mao Dead Fifty Years Ago!
Julian Gewirtz, author and former Biden NSC China director, joins ChinaTalk days before Xi Jinping’s first White House visit since 2015. Wit...
Can AI Beat the Pentagon’s Bureaucracy?
Garrett Berntsen was last seen on ChinaTalk in his role as Deputy CDAO at the State Department. He then went to the Department of Defense fo...
WarTalk: PLA, 2027, Nukes, and the Pivot to Asia Pirouette
In the deserts of western China sit 320 brand-new missile silos, and for a while, by the Pentagon's account, some of them simply didn't work...
ModelTalk: Pacing the Frontier
ModelTalk regulars Nathan Lambert, who writes Interconnects, and writer Jasmine Sun join to work through a week in which Dario asked the ind...
WarTalk: 9.11, Death of the Army, So Long Dan Driscoll
In the week of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Secretary of the Army walked into the White House, told the president the force is breaking...
WarTalk: GWOT at 25 with Wesley Morgan
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the Pech Valley represents the war in miniature: outposts meant to shield Afghan villages that instead drew th...
Cyber Apocalypse, Now? Hugging Face and the Future of Cyber Risk
OpenAI models mid-training broke out of their sandbox, hacked internal infrastructure, and eventually compromised Hugging Face — the first h...
WarTalk: USN Readiness Reckoning, Steampunk Navy, and AI Cyberwar with Shashank of the Economist
The USS Abraham Lincoln is coming home after a deployment that stretched past 240 days, and the bill is about to come due: mechanical failur...
How AI Becomes a Political Crisis
The political economy of AI — things are getting weird, it seems. We have models on the loose, open weights being dropped from the heavenly...
Lessons from the American Civil War
Note: This episode was recorded in late 2024. Luckily, there haven't been any US Civil War updates since then, so the episode's content stil...
North Korea's Messiah
Why is North Korea so weird? Is it Stalinism? Maoism? Japan-style emperor worship? Ancient Korean hermit kingdom energy? No, argues Jonathan...
The Rise of China’s Electric Vehicle Industry
How did China grow its EV industry? Hint: it wasn’t really central planning from Beijing. It was a magical concoction of entrepreneurs and l...
China's Best Music in 2026 (So Far)
Jake Newby is the author of the Concrete Avalanche Substack, which covers the best music coming out of China. If you enjoy this playlist, ch...
$75k Contest Launch! ChinaTalk Hiring + Evals for the Situation Room
Contest links: General $50k https://www.chinatalk.media/p/50k-chinatalk-submission-hiring-contest we're looking at submissions on a rolling...