ChinaTalk

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

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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 stakeholders and keeps workers happy.


Clean Air Act vs. chips — Why Arizona’s fabs struggled to get building permits despite the state’s low per-capita emissions.


Arizona’s Abundance Playbook — Including a consolidated commerce authority, a culture of engineering > litigation, and institutional factors that help Arizona outbuild Ohio and Texas.


Taiwanifying the Desert — How Phoenix welcomed TSMC engineers with Mandarin programs in schools, Din Tai Fung, and a new Costco.


Industrial Policy Resource Wars — How Arizona avoids backlash based on power and water use concerns.

Co-hosting is ChinaTalk researcher Aqib Zakaria.

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner

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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 of the most-read analysts of the Russia-Ukraine war; he's joined on the show by WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark, Tony Stark, and Justin.

We discuss…


The six-month infantry rotation and what isolation, drone threat, and zero-line resupply do to a human being


Why Ukraine has reclaimed the drone edge — and what the Hornet, Bumblebee, and FP2 are doing to Russian logistics


Ukraine's new corps structure, where the brigade-only model broke down, and what the Azov-derived elite corps look like


Why 2% of Ukrainian casualties come from small arms and what infantry are actually doing on the zero line


Starlink as the indispensable game-changer — and Russia's increasingly serious attempt to jam it


Combat casualty care when CASEVAC takes 12 hours, the golden hour is dead, and tourniquets sit on for a month


What the Marine Corps should steal from Ukraine — pushing Hornets to the battalion, Bumblebees to the company, and giving up something to make room

this ep's a little too dark for a suno song
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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 Horizon Institute for Public Service, which builds pipelines into government for emerging-tech talent.

We discuss…


Why $10 million globally on lead remediation tells you everything about how undertalented the world's most important problems are


Ambition + humility as the Horizon Fellowship's selection criteria — and why most candidates need to hear the opposite of what they expect


"We care meetings" vs. "we decide meetings," the Geithner heuristic for surviving senior government roles


The tribal KPIs of the White House — what the Office of Public Engagement, speech writing, and comms actually want from a policy nerd


The conscious-incompetence quadrant and why "your job is not to be the expert, your job is to mobilize expertise"


The posting-to-policy pipeline, the rise of the individual writer, and the introspective work that public writing forces


My Bulgarian tanks fantasy vs. the value-over-replacement case for picking your own hobby horse

Horizon recently launched Launchpad, a Substack on working in emerging tech policy with advice, explainers, and conversations like this one — if you enjoyed this conversation, you’ll probably like their other stuff as well.
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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 Cold War Bid for Global Power — which won a ChinaTalk Book of the Year award and got the four-hour podcast treatment — as well as ChinaTalk regulars Kevin Xu of Interconnected and Jon Czin, formerly of the CIA and NSC, now with Brookings.

Our conversation covers:


Prestige politics on the cheap — How Trump's delegation gawked at Chinese architecture while Xi scored propaganda points by getting the U.S. president to fawn over Zhongnanhai's gardens — reversing decades of diplomatic protocol.


The G2 that never was — Why Trump's dream of running the world with Xi echoes Nixon and Brezhnev's failed détente, and how strategic competition makes genuine cooperation impossible regardless of personal chemistry.


The AI factor — As Beijing struggles with compute constraints and export controls, the US brings its AI safety dialogue proposal as its only real leverage in an otherwise empty summit.


The midterm calculation — How Xi is withholding concessions until September 2026, betting that Trump will need wins most desperately right before the elections.


Who’s using the pause better? — While China methodically builds domestic chip capacity and refuses even approved Nvidia exports, the U.S. struggles with basic industrial policy on rare earths.

song: https://suno.com/s/cwNGihewAFKpkJls

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