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....
May 22, 2026•56 min
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 ...
May 18, 2026•1 hr 8 min
Julian Gewirtz , former Biden administration China official, now at Columbia, joins me to chat about the Xi-Trump visit and all things US-China. Matt Sheehan , senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, drops by to give his takes on the AI angle. We cover: What to expect (and not expect) from the Trump-Xi “stalemate summit” Historical echoes from the 1793 Macartney mission and the 1972 Nixon-Kissinger opening — summit optics, status games, and the choreography of power. Tai...
May 12, 2026•1 hr 20 min
The White House says the war is over. The White House also says it's continuing in a new form. Two weeks after the launch of Project Freedom, only two Maersk ships took the offer. Roughly 900 ships remain trapped in the Persian Gulf, and the Saudis just declined to grant basing or overflight rights. Retired Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan — founding director of the Pentagon's Joint AI Center and former head of Project Maven — joins Bryan Clark, Eric Robinson, Tony Stark, and Justin McIntosh to dig into t...
May 09, 2026•1 hr 20 min
Ken Liu graces ChinaTalk with his presence. He is the author of the Dandelion Dynasty silkpunk fantasy series and a brilliant short fiction writer — one of his stories was recently adapted into Sam Altman’s favorite show, Pantheon . We all know his translation work on the first and third volumes of the Three-Body Problem trilogy, but even better was his absolutely brilliant translation and commentary of the Dao De Jing . As much as I hoped that project would get him fully on the classical Chines...
May 07, 2026•1 hr 18 min
Two weeks into the US-Iran ceasefire, CENTCOM is requesting Dark Eagle hypersonics, the 82nd Airborne is flowing into theater, and the wargames keep telling us the same thing — there’s no military solution to the Strait of Hormuz. Becca Wasser, America’s wargaming queen, currently with Bloomberg, joins WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark, Eric Robinson, and Justin Mc . We discuss… Why CENTCOM is using JASSMs to hit targets a glide bomb could handle What cosplay costs the Indo-Pacific The myth of US air...
Apr 30, 2026•1 hr 3 min
Constanza Vidal Bustamante joins Chris Miller and Zachary Yerushalmi to break down her new report with John Burke, Quantum's Industrial Moment: Strengthening US Quantum Supply Chains for Scalable Advantage — a deep dive into the components, chokepoints, and policy levers that will decide who wins the race to a fault-tolerant quantum computer. We discuss… (00:00) Why quantum is "pre-transistor" — and why the US still has time to lock in supply chain dominance before the next-gen architecture is e...
Apr 27, 2026•1 hr 15 min
The Pentagon is leaking to the press that America doesn't have the missiles to win a war over Taiwan — and the Iran war is the reason why. Meanwhile, a Special Forces master sergeant is looking at federal charges for a $400,000 Polymarket bet on the Maduro regime, and SecNav John Phelan spent an hour sitting in the West Wing lobby waiting to get fired. To discuss, WarTalk is joined by Bryan Clark (former submariner, Hudson Institute), Justin Mc (former Green Beret, now in defense tech), Eric Rob...
Apr 24, 2026•58 min
outtro music: Pardon Pen! https://suno.com/s/2tXSJ7uJFA7k1pUC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Apr 23, 2026•25 min
What exactly is quantum computing? Why does it matter, and what would it actually mean to “win” the quantum race? Zach Yerushalmi , CEO of Elevate Quantum, a Mountain West–based public-private consortium advancing the U.S. quantum ecosystem, and Chris Miller join the podcast to discuss. Our conversation covers… What Quantum Computing Actually Is — A primer on qubits, superposition, and why quantum computers aren’t “faster classical machines” but fundamentally different systems designed to simula...
Apr 20, 2026•1 hr 13 min
We discuss… Why Mythos is a Dr. Strangelove moment — and whether the better analogy is a nuke or a pandemic Who gets the keys : Ukraine vs. South Korea vs. Japan vs. the Five Eyes, and why the Defense Production Act now looks likelier than the supply-chain-risk designation The death of the patch model — and the return of air-gapped networks, mesh comms, and couriers shuttling classified work in person Steve Feinberg's half-trillion-dollar portfolio , the rise of direct-reporting program managers...
Apr 17, 2026•1 hr 2 min
Caleb Watney (Institute for Progress) and Max Bodach (Foundation for American Innovation) on what the new breed of DC think tanks does differently and why the old model is broken. We discuss: Why "counterfactual policy impact" matters more than white papers and what's wrong with project-based funding Cross-partisanship vs. picking sides: IFP pulls the rope sideways, FAI builds a big tent on the right Vertical integration over specialization — the person who wrote the brief should be the one sell...
Apr 16, 2026•1 hr 8 min
Anthropic’s new model found decades-old vulnerabilities in foundational open-source code that millions of automated tests and countless human experts had missed, presaging a potentially revolutionary moment in cyber. Ben Buchanan, former senior advisor for AI at the White House and author of The Hacker and the State , and Michael Sulmeyer, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy, join the show to break it all down. Full disclosure: Ben advises Anthropic. We discuss… How Mythos fou...
Apr 12, 2026•57 min
Eric Robinson, Tony Stark , Justin Mc , and Secretary of Defense Rock join me to score the Iran conflict. We discuss… Whether Iran’s Strait of Hormuz toll booth is a Trump card or a wasting asset How the administration fumbled the messaging on the war’s most heroic moment — the JSOC pilot rescue deep inside Iran The Prussia 1806 parallel: are we a great military machine that’s forgotten how to fight? Colby’s bizarre knife fight with Pope Leo McMasterism, dereliction of duty, and why no one is pu...
Apr 10, 2026•1 hr 3 min
Ukrainian drone manufacturing. How has the country been able to build hundreds of thousands, even millions of drones over the past four years of conflict? What dependencies does its industrial base still have on China? And what lessons does its rapid scaling offer for the rest of the world? To discuss, we’re joined by Cat Buchatskiy , Director of Analytics at Snake Island , a military analytical group, along with Chris Miller Our conversation covers: How battlefield pressure forced Ukraine to bu...
Apr 07, 2026•1 hr 4 min
An F-15E is down in southern Iran. Justin, Tony, Eric and I talk through what combat search and rescue actually looks like, how a captured pilot changes the politics of ending this war, and why a hostage makes the "pack up and go home" play functionally impossible. Then: the AWACS that "only" lost a third of itself on a Saudi tarmac, why CENTCOM is still parking high-value aircraft like it's 2003, and what Operation Spiderweb and three years of Ukrainian drone warfare should have taught us but d...
Apr 03, 2026•1 hr 11 min
The history of the American federal civil service — what can we learn from its past glories and failures, and where should we take this next? We have Kevin Hawickhorst of the Foundation for American Innovation to discuss: The Pendleton Act myth — Why civil service reform didn’t begin or end with Pendleton, and why starting the story there misses what actually made the system work. The rise of the subject-matter state — How early 20th-century agencies staffed with real experts — entomologists, ...
Apr 01, 2026•58 min
Jen Pahlka is an American Hero, in a past life the US Deputy Chief Technology Officer and member of the Defense Innovation Board. She wrote Recoding America and the wonderful Eating Policy substack (https://www.eatingpolicy.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 27, 2026•59 min
Full house with Bryan, Eric, Tony and Justin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 25, 2026•53 min
Nathan Lambert of https://www.interconnects.ai/ and Jasmine Sun of https://jasmi.news/ catch up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 23, 2026•41 min
The administration is reportedly considering seizing Kharg Island, and the global economy is beginning to buckle under the pressure of disrupted energy flows. Eric Robinson is a lawyer now who worked in NCTC, a veteran of Joint Special Operations Command. He joins Second Breakfast regulars Bryan Clark, Tony Stark, and Justin McIntosh to break down the military and strategic realities of America's latest Middle Eastern war. We discuss… The Kharg Island fantasy and why a coup de main three weeks t...
Mar 20, 2026•1 hr 19 min
A century-old toy company has taken down Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs with a self-funded lawsuit. But how? Today’s guest is Rick Woldenberg , CEO of Learning Resources, creator of Spike the Fine Motor Hedgehog , and a successful Supreme Court plaintiff in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump . Co-hosting is Peter Harrell , who submitted an amicus brief on the tariff case that shook the world. Our conversation covers: David v. Goliath — Why a mid-sized toy company sued when industry giants stayed ...
Mar 19, 2026•34 min
WarTalk launches! We chat with Pranay Vaddi (MIT, Sandia, formerly Biden NSC) and Chris McGuire (State, NSC, now CFR) about AI, nuclear command and control, deterrence, and how new military technologies could reshape strategic stability. We cover why the U.S. insists on keeping humans in the loop for nuclear employment decisions, where AI may still play a role in warning and decision support, and how drone warfare, undersea detection, and strategic AI capabilities could change the future of war....
Mar 16, 2026•1 hr 59 min
Two weeks into the US-Iran war, CENTCOM has struck 6,000 targets, but Hormuz is closed, oil is at $100 a barrel, the regime hasn’t fallen, and 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium sit somewhere under rubble. Shashank Joshi of The Economist , Justin Mc , and Tony Stark drop in to Second Breakfast for week two of the Iran war. We discuss… Why CENTCOM’s 6,000-target tally sounds like a Vietnam body count The staggering failure to prepare for mine and drone countermeasures for the one strait CEN...
Mar 13, 2026•1 hr 10 min
Kevin Xu of http://interconnected.blog/ and I did a liveshow on substack! We chat about why working in Chinese AI looks so much tougher than building in the West: less compute, lower upside, more political constraints, and a much weaker market for enterprise software. We also get into Kevin Xu's definitive history of open source in China (https://interconnected.blog/chinese-open-source-a-definitive-history/?ref=kevin-xus-interconnected-newsletter) and talk why open source has become one of the f...
Mar 12, 2026•51 min
Russell Kaplan , co-founder of Cognition — the company behind Devin — and previously at Scale AI and Tesla, joins the podcast to discuss what “software abundance” could mean for government. Our conversation covers… Why government software is so broken — Despite spending over $100B annually on IT, critical systems at agencies like the Social Security Administration and U.S. Department of the Treasury still run on decades-old code that few engineers know how to modify. How two-year software projec...
Mar 09, 2026•57 min
Frank Kendall served as the 26th Secretary of the Air Force from 2021 to 2025. Before that he was Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics under Obama. His new book, Lethal Autonomy: The Future of Warfare , comes out in June. Cohosting today is Bryan Clark of Hudson, JustinMc and Eric Robinson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 06, 2026•1 hr 16 min
Mike Horowitz, Penn Professor and Biden DoD official who wrote 3000.09, clears up some autonomous weapons misconceptions! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 05, 2026•41 min
An all-star cast today with: Emmy Probasco , a fellow at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) and former Navy officer with deep expertise in autonomous weapons and military AI adoption; Michael Horowitz , a University of Pennsylvania professor who previously ran the Pentagon office that rewrote U.S. policy on autonomy in weapons systems; Bryan Clark , a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute and retired Navy officer specializing in naval warfare and military technolog...
Mar 02, 2026•1 hr 20 min
what a mess! Wario Amodei's slow jam vibe: https://suno.com/s/cf3KDdVQ5F0KCjow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Feb 27, 2026•1 hr 24 min
