Episodes

  • The Manhattan Project, Take Two

    The Manhattan Project, Take Two
    Oct 29 2026
    In the new era of global competition, being at the forefront of Super Intelligence innovation equals geopolitical power. To maintain leadership and establish the next world order, the U.S. is moving to cement its lead. Barnett Koven is a Managing Director of AI and Data at Accenture Federal Services. He came to Accenture Federal Services after stints in industry and a faculty job at the University of Maryland, where his counterinsurgency research showed that some of the most influential quantitative studies got the answer exactly backwards. We discuss… Why “inaction is in and of itself risky” — and how government risk-aversion compounds against less-cautious competitors The “gun-armor race” in classified AI environments, where defense costs grow exponentially against linear offense Entity resolution and predictive modeling for BIS export-control enforcement, and unwrapping the PLA’s shell-company maze DOE’s Genesis Mission and Accenture Federal’s “backbone for scientific research” Thank you to Accenture Federal Services for bringing us this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    46 mins
  • What's Broken About China's Economy + The Cost of Keeping China Out | Meg Rithmire

    What's Broken About China's Economy + The Cost of Keeping China Out | Meg Rithmire
    Oct 27 2026
    ChinaTalk spends a lot of time on the leading lights of the Chinese economy... the MiniMaxes, ByteDances, Unitrees, and BYDs of the world. But what about the rest of the system, the part growing at zero to two percent? To talk about what's broken, not just what works, we talk with Meg Rithmire. Meg is the James E. Robison Professor at Harvard Business School and author of Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia. With UC San Diego's Peter Cowhey, she recently wrote "The Cost of Keeping China Out" for Foreign Affairs, which argues that Washington should let some Chinese firms build in America... on strict terms. We discuss… Mafia firms: how Anbang, HNA, and Wanda raised money on stock exchanges, tunneled it into subsidiaries by the thousands, and bought the Waldorf Astoria without making anything at all How China's zombie firms moved out of real estate and into industrial policy, why households put up with it when "the rest of the world seems awful," and what Japan teaches about living well with bad macro numbers Why the Chinese Communist Party is more nervous about controlling its own champions than Western media assumes A reverse Tesla: Meg's case for letting BYD and CATL build in the US with localized supply chains, split hardware and software, and continuous monitoring US vs. China corruption Plus: the Indonesian tycoon hiding behind the building on Meg's book cover, whether AI can do David Barboza's paper-trail reporting in five seconds Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 34 mins
  • WarTalk: Kofman on Starlink + What Ukraine Can Teach the U.S. Military

    WarTalk: Kofman on Starlink + What Ukraine Can Teach the U.S. Military
    Oct 25 2026
    Ukraine and Russia have rebuilt their armies around drones, deception, and long-range strike. What should the U.S. military take from it? Michael Kofman joins WarTalk regulars Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark. We discuss: How much leverage the U.S. still has over the war, and why Europe can't replace America's role in NATO. Why buying drones means nothing without drone platoons and companies to fight with them. Why no one owns the night anymore, and why the U.S. military has no culture of decoys. What counts as a lesson from Ukraine, and discussions on wet-gap crossings Plus: getting rich as a military analyst, and how to tell real maneuver from sparkling mobility. Timestamps: 00:00:00 Intro 00:03:28 U.S. leverage in Ukraine 00:30:02 Who will fight with the drones? 00:47:05 You don't own the night 01:04:32 Wet gap crossings 01:08:56 What to tell Congress Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 25 mins
  • The MATCH Act and China’s DUV Imports

    The MATCH Act and China’s DUV Imports
    Oct 20 2026
    Nick Brown is a co-founder of the Center for Technology and Statecraft (CTS), a new think tank spun out of IFP, that looks at long-term technology challenges and opportunities facing the US. Nick was a physics major, spent a while as a software engineer in and around government, and had an arc as an aspiring concert violinist. But we’re here to talk about what is in pole position for my paper of the year: his master class on what would happen if the US cut off DUV exports to China: DUV Immersion Lithography: The Foundation of US AI Compute Advantage. Co-hosting is ChinaTalk’s Aqib Zakaria.We discuss: The case for banning DUV exports to China: Why lithography is the hardest part of the semiconductor manufacturing stack for China to replicate/indigenize and the strongest point of leverage the US and its allies have over China’s future AI compute. The cannonball-sized hole in US export controls: China imported roughly 90 immersion lithography systems a year in 2024–25, nearly two-thirds of ASML’s immersion exports. If imports continue at this rate, China could approach or even reach parity with the US in AI chipmaking within a decade. What the MATCH Act would do: How Congress could close this gap by restricting DUV immersion exports and servicing, and whether the US can get its allies on board. Will Beijing retaliate? Why a gradual, long-term restriction may be less likely to provoke another rare-earths crisis Buying time for AGI: How cutting off DUV imports could preserve America’s AI compute advantage into the 2030s, giving the US more time to navigate the technological, geopolitical, and societal implications of increasingly powerful AI. Timestamps: 00:00:00 Intro 00:07:11 EUV vs. DUV 00:21:55 What the MATCH Act does 00:41:24 Would Beijing retaliate? 00:58:59 Japan, the Netherlands, and the light-source option Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 18 mins
  • Drone Dominance | Travis Metz - DIU Acting Director

    Drone Dominance | Travis Metz - DIU Acting Director
    Oct 17 2026
    He was recently promoted to DIU’s acting director after spending the past year running the Drone Dominance Program. Co-hosting are Brian Clark, senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a retired submariner, and Justin McIntosh, a twenty-year retired Green Beret who served in the 1st and 5th Groups, who now works in defense tech and writes a Substack called Mind of Things. We discuss: Why the Department of War isn’t going fast enough to procure, scale, and field drones, and how the DIU’s Gauntlet competition is using real orders, competition, and falling prices to build a drone industry capable of producing at scale. What American drone makers can learn from Ukraine’s battlefield laboratory and how the Pentagon is trying to replicate the conditions of electronic warfare in its evaluations. Why the US drone industry is “wide but not deep,” how the first orders banning Chinese motors and battery packs are testing the limits of supply-chain decoupling, and why Drone Dominance alone can’t solve dependencies in battery chemistry and rare-earth refining. Why the future of drone warfare depends on systems that can operate autonomously under electronic attack, and how Metz thinks mass-produced, increasingly autonomous drones will reshape military procurement, training, and force structure. Timestamps: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:27 How Drone Dominance works 00:08:36 Ukraine, jamming, and the Gauntlets 00:32:41 Component supply chain 00:47:37 Doctrine and forcing functions 01:03:11 Bombers, pilots, and autonomy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 23 mins
  • Why a Chinese AI Lab’s Product Lead Thinks AGI is “Inevitable” | Richard Bian

    Why a Chinese AI Lab’s Product Lead Thinks AGI is “Inevitable” | Richard Bian
    Oct 16 2026
    Richard Bian is the head of product operations for Ant Ling, the foundational LLM at Ant. If you don’t know Ant, they most famously make Alipay, which makes your money and your world run when you’re in China and sometimes beyond. Richard is a former software engineer at Microsoft and Square, and he previously served as head of open source at Ant, where he scaled the open source initiative into a dedicated team. He’s lived and worked in Singapore, Canada, the US, and China, and he loves to build products. Topics covered: The Hugging Face hack as a sign of progress? Why Richard sees the incident involving OpenAI research agents as an inevitable discovery rather than simply a disaster, and why finding a solution now is a positive development. AGI is coming, but nobody knows what it will look like. AGI is inevitable, and we’re still in the early stages of figuring out what these models can do. Rather than obsessing over leaderboards, we need better evaluations and a more open-minded approach to judging models. Open source as a product strategy, not just a way to give things away. How open-weight models can harness global talent, accelerate development, and support a diverse ecosystem of products, and why the real business challenge is gross margins rather than capex. Why the AI conversation needs more voices. Why we need to pay attention to diverse perspectives on where AI is going, and be more willing to explore rather than declare the endgame. AI moves fast: since we recorded, Ant Ling has announced its latest LLM, Ling 3.1 Flash, which was open-sourced on October 14 with 560B parameters and up to a 1M-token context window. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 14 mins
  • From Posting to Policy: Saif Khan on DUV and the AI Balance

    From Posting to Policy: Saif Khan on DUV and the AI Balance
    Oct 15 2026
    Saif Khan makes his ChinaTalk debut. He is perhaps my favorite example of posting-to-policy that I’ve seen over the course of my time following Washington. Saif wrote some truly excellent deep dives into AI and semiconductors during his time at CSET, then went into the NSC and Commerce in the early-to-mid 2020s, across both the Biden and Trump II administrations, to help manifest the export control regulatory regime we have today. He is now out of government and launching the Center for Technology and Statecraft, an IFP-affiliated think tank, which is already producing excellent, grounded, technical, forward-looking work that will certainly shape many an AI policy discussion in the years to come. We discuss: Why Saif started a new think tank, and the value of deep, forward-looking policy research in an AI world moving at breakneck speed; CTS’s landmark DUV report, which projects that stopping tool exports today could leave China producing roughly 100x fewer AI chips than the US by the mid-2030s, making DUV controls the US’s most consequential lever over the AI balance; How rigorous research actually translates into government policy, and why think tank experience is valuable before working in government; Robotics as the next frontier of US-China AI competition, and the security vs. diffusion mindsets shaping AI policy; How AI is changing policy research itself, the challenge of bringing AI into government, and what AI-driven economic and social change could mean for humans. Plus, why everyone should read Lu Xun, why AI might socialize like insects, and AI-nannying. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr
  • Matt Yglesias + Jerusalem Demsas + Jordan Crossover Pod

    Matt Yglesias + Jerusalem Demsas + Jordan Crossover Pod
    Oct 12 2026
    I join Matt and Jerusalem for an unhinged conversation (most entertaining of the year?) about China, AI, corruption, politics, and various other things. Check out their show The Argument, it's good. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 8 mins