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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/

Website ↗ Last published 31 October 2026 583 posts collected by Sputnik

Said on ChinaTalk

“The Navy's found that the best way to shoot down the Shaheds… is airplanes. And they are now equipping them with APKWS. So they've got these laser-guided rockets that the army uses on helicopters to shoot whatever stuff on the ground. They found that those are really good for shooting down these drones, like the Shahed-type drones.” — Bryan Clark, ChinaTalk
Bryan Clark · 31 Oct 2026 Listen →
“We make fun of them now, but Intel really broke the mold when they stopped designing chips for the military and just started designing chips to sell to everybody and then told the military, you can buy them too. And that movement is, if you can't get to that and that's not replicable, then yeah, you're right. Your addressable market is the military. So it's necessarily smaller.” — Justin McIntosh, ChinaTalk
Justin McIntosh · 31 Oct 2026 Listen →
“A lot of the original research and counterinsurgency… looked at the use of development assistance in a given village or area on sort of insurgent violence in the village and completely ignored the fact that in a sort of insurgency, what's happening in one village is observable to the insurgent as well as to sort of residents in other areas… And what I ended up finding was that on average, you actually only serve to displace and possibly exacerbate the violence. So in sort of this original published research, you said, yes, development aid is good and it reduces violence, when in reality, the opposite was true.” — Barnett Koven, ChinaTalk
Barnett Koven · 29 Oct 2026 Listen →
“It seems to me it's very hard to have a modern financial system without the rule of law. I know it's shocking. … You can't have half the economy owned by the state with no minority shareholder protections, no transparency into what the bottom line is, and then say, but the other half of the economy, the private sector, has to work according to the rule of law. We do rule of the party, you guys do rule of law, right? It's the same economy. It's the same stock market.” — Meg Rithmire, ChinaTalk
Meg Rithmire · 27 Oct 2026 Listen →
“In 2008, China was like the 172nd worst country in the world for getting a construction permit. But also in 2008, half of the world's construction cranes were in China. And we see with our eyes that someone's building buildings, whether they have a construction permit or not.” — Meg Rithmire, ChinaTalk
Meg Rithmire · 27 Oct 2026 Listen →
“There's no culture of decoys. It's one of the most important things in the Russian framework. There's like no culture of decoys. U.S. military will take a $500 million asset that's hard to replace and just put it out there, visible in commercial satellite imagery with no effort to mask it and no decoys.” — Michael Kofman, ChinaTalk
Michael Kofman · 25 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Usually, when the military first deploys something in the battlefield, they just duct tape it to the way they fight. They're like, there's a new thing, and we're gonna add it as a plus-up to how we fight now. And then somebody else might come along later and say, that's interesting, but it's actually much more interesting if you build more of the force around that technology instead of having that technology just be an add-in.” — Michael Kofman, ChinaTalk
Michael Kofman · 25 Oct 2026 Listen →
“There's a SEAL, well-known SEAL that came to help us evaluate these and fly these things. … He's four standard deviations on this thing. I can't rely on his judgment about which drones to buy for that reason. He wants to fly the drone, do backflips, and land it on a dinner plate. I don't need that. We want the drone that takes care of itself.” — Travis Metz, ChinaTalk
Travis Metz · 17 Oct 2026 Listen →
“We actually have a very wide, and I would say sophisticated drone industry here. I say wide because it's not deep. I'm sort of impressed by the quality of the entrepreneurs and the quality of the ideas that they have, but none of them scale. … Everyone gets mad at me when I say that. And when I say scaled, I mean, tell me where you are on the log chart versus 8 million a year. Because that's what scaled looks like. It's not having made 1,000 last week.” — Travis Metz, ChinaTalk
Travis Metz · 17 Oct 2026 Listen →
“What really concerns me at this moment is the gross margin. … For SaaS and for mobile internet, you're actually having a business model viable because the gross margins of building a software is probably 95%. … We don't see the same thing happens in AI right now. The gross margin is really low and 30%, 40% are like pretty good already on inferences.” — Richard Bian, ChinaTalk
Richard Bian · 16 Oct 2026 Listen →
“By the mid-2030s, we would expect the U.S. to have, with pretty significant error bars, something like production of a billion NVIDIA H100-equivalent chips per year. If we stop the flow of DUV immersion tools today, we project that China is probably going to be capped out at something like 10 million per year in their indigenous production… Whereas if you continue to export these tools, there's a plausible world where the uncertainty ranges of U.S. production start to overlap with Chinese production. So we could potentially give that entire lead away.” — Saif Khan, ChinaTalk
Saif Khan · 15 Oct 2026 Listen →
“It's a generalized negativity where you want to both say this could never be as good as me and my friends, but also it's going to be so good that it destroys everything.” — Matt Yglesias, ChinaTalk
Matt Yglesias · 12 Oct 2026 Listen →

Hosts

ChinaTalk is hosted by Jordan Schneider , Justin McIntosh , Tony Stark , Bryan Clark , Chris Miller , Eric Robinson , Irene Zhang , Aqib Zakaria , Eric Lofgren , Nicholas Welch , Lily Ottinger and Emily Jin .

Recent Episodes

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    WarTalk: Pressing the War Button: Iran, Cuba, and Rubio 2028

  2. 29 Oct 2026

    The Manhattan Project, Take Two

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  3. 27 Oct 2026

    What's Broken About China's Economy + The Cost of Keeping China Out | Meg Rithmire

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  4. 25 Oct 2026

    WarTalk: Kofman on Starlink + What Ukraine Can Teach the U.S. Military

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  5. 20 Oct 2026

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  6. 17 Oct 2026

    Drone Dominance | Travis Metz - DIU Acting Director

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  7. 16 Oct 2026

    Why a Chinese AI Lab’s Product Lead Thinks AGI is “Inevitable” | Richard Bian

    With Richard Bian

  8. 15 Oct 2026

    From Posting to Policy: Saif Khan on DUV and the AI Balance

    With Saif Khan

  9. 12 Oct 2026

    Matt Yglesias + Jerusalem Demsas + Jordan Crossover Pod

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  10. 8 Oct 2026

    AGI Believers: Kevin Roose on the Race

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  11. 6 Oct 2026

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  12. 5 Oct 2026

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Guests

Dylan Patel (18 episodes), Doug O'Laughlin (16 episodes), Nathan Lambert (12 episodes), Kevin Xu (12 episodes), Peter Harrell (9 episodes), Matt Klein (9 episodes), Jasmine Sun (8 episodes), Jake Newby (7 episodes), Matt Sheehan (6 episodes), Shashank Joshi (5 episodes), Logan Wright (5 episodes), Kamil Galeev (4 episodes), and 500 more.