ChinaTalk

Ely Ratner, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs and now a principal at the Marathon Initiative, joins Jordan, Bryan Clark, and Justin to make sense of the Iran ceasefire and where US-China competition goes next.

We discuss:

Why the MOU reads as a loss: the blockade comes down first, Iran keeps its missiles and its "nuclear dust," and a younger, harder regime learns it can take American firepower and wield an oil weapon

The "bullshit détente" with Beijing and whether reindustrialization can carry a China-competition message without sounding hawkish

Output metrics over input metrics, the seven-year force-posture problem, and what Ratner wishes he'd moved into the "break glass" category at the Pentagon

RoboCom: the pros and cons of standing up a new combatant command

Plus Crassus at Parthia, and why chasing parades is a bad idea unless you're the ny knicks

suno song: https://suno.com/s/scu8twGj01AIOYSL
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Chris McGuire, former civil servant in State and the Biden White House now at CFR, talk about the export control craziness of these past two weeks.

We discuss:

The 5:21 PM letter that took the world's most powerful model offline

Why the "let it rip" administration pivoted to mandatory AI regulation overnight

The incoherent export-control regime: regs that still say one thing while policy says another

The overseas-subsidiary loophole, the Sunday emergency fix, and the foundry gap still left open

outtro music: https://suno.com/s/UVeDiboPyj0jvIgO
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nathan Lambert of https://www.interconnects.ai/, Jasmine Sun of https://jasmi.news/, and guest Ethan Ding of https://ethanding.substack.com/ check in
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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