Twenty-five years after 9/11, the Pech Valley represents the war in miniature: outposts meant to shield Afghan villages that instead drew the fighting to their doorsteps, built for reasons nobody manning them could explain. Wesley Morgan spent a decade finding out why.

Wesley Morgan is the author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley, winner of the 2022 Colby Award. He first embedded in the Pech as a college student in 2010 and later covered the Pentagon for Politico.

We discuss…

• How a timber dispute became the Korengal — one Green Beret team refused the bait, the next took it, and Big Taliban followed
• The three tribes of the war in the east — conventional forces, Green Berets, and the JSOC task force, each fighting its own war in the same valleys
• Ten thousand beanie babies and record artillery expenditure — how measures of performance swallowed measures of effectiveness
• Black Hawk Down, Ghost Recon, and the making of multicam — how Crye sold the camouflage of the elite through video games because it couldn't advertise its Delta contract
• The death of the embed — Rumsfeld overruling Colin Powell, the 2013 shutdown, and why influencers in the briefing r4om beat reporters in the field
• Whether the Army learned anything at all — disbanding the Asymmetric Warfare Group, rebuilding short-range air defense from zero, and Ukraine as the excuse to never say "Afghanistan" again

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OpenAI models mid-training broke out of their sandbox, hacked internal infrastructure, and eventually compromised Hugging Face — the first headline-grade AI breakout, and one that safety researchers saw coming. Is the cyber apocalypse finally on the calendar, or does the industry just need to do its homework?

Joshua Saxe spent his formative years as a DARPA and NSA contractor before four years at Meta, where he founded the company’s frontier cyber capabilities evals team and finished as its AI security tech lead. He recently left to co-found Abundant Security.

We discuss…

• What actually happened in the Hugging Face hack, and why AI safety insiders weren’t surprised,

• The “grad student lab” security culture inside frontier labs racing sixty hours a week to ship,

• Why the cyber Pearl Harbor predicted since the early 2000s never arrived — and whether swarms of hacking agents finally change that,

• How nation states will post-train open-weight models like GLM and Kimi into billion-dollar cyber weapons,

• Why AI has so far favored defenders, from mass bug-squashing to superhuman network monitoring,

• The industrial economics of cybercrime — kill chains, ransomware divisions of labor, and whether AI gives criminals 100x returns.

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The USS Abraham Lincoln is coming home after a deployment that stretched past 240 days, and the bill is about to come due: mechanical failures, rations down to the emergency stores, 20,000 unfilled billets at sea, and a maintenance backlog funneling into the one carrier repair yard on each coast. Meanwhile, the White House wants to tear the electromagnetic catapults out of the Ford class and put steam back in.

We're joined by Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, a former submariner and Navy strategist, and Shashank Joshi, who has just handed off the defense brief at The Economist and decamped to Washington, alongside regulars Justin McIntosh and Tony Stark.

We discuss…

• Why the fleet breaks: extended deployments, generators failing in the South China Sea, Diego Garcia resupply chains, and 12-hour flight deck shifts that don't end
• The reenlistment cliff — what happens when half a carrier's crew hits their decision point right after the worst deployment of their careers
• Steam catapults and hydraulic elevators: 35,000 successful EMALS launches, a four-year delay to the next carrier, and 500 sailors added back to a ship designed to need fewer
• Whether agentic AI finally gives cyber its strategic moment, or whether dropping a bomb on the power plant remains the cheaper option
• The offense-defense balance, and why the drone debate should make us humble about predicting it
• The PLA Rocket Force's new corruption tip line — a purge that fixes a force, or one that reveals how deep the rot goes
• Chinese components in Ukrainian drones, the Rockchip inside a $400 hugging-face robot, and how much of the Internet of Things you can afford to worry about

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The political economy of AI — things are getting weird, it seems. We have models on the loose, open weights being dropped from the heavenly temple, and data center protests fanning out across the land. There’s a lot of salience in a way that feels really different than it did even six months ago. To discuss, we have the wonderful Anton Leicht, a fellow at Carnegie and author of the excellent Substack Threading the Needle.

Our conversation covers:

• Why even a small amount of AI-driven unemployment could upend national politics, especially if agents start replacing junior white-collar workers and breaking the career pipeline,

• What policymakers can do to protect workers without calcifying the economy, how to collect better data on AI and labor, and whether to subsidize junior hiring,

• The case for funding the AI transition with corporate income taxes instead of token taxes, and why offering the government AI equity or “golden shares” would backfire,

• Data center backlash, strategies for winning hearts and minds, and options for friendshoring AI infrastructure,

• The political economy of safety — why pausing AI development wouldn’t work, but a coordinated slowdown might,

• The coming reckoning between open source and the national security state.

Plus, Kafka on bureaucracy and happenstance, how Anton’s years in esports shaped his career, and why new ideas seem to travel more easily through American policy discourse than European institutions.

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Note: This episode was recorded in late 2024. Luckily, there haven't been any US Civil War updates since then, so the episode's content still holds up. Enjoy!

During paternity leave, the new influx of dad energy compelled me to read close to 15 titles on the American Civil War.

The Civil War is a case study in traditional ChinaTalk themes like technological change and organizational design. It is also a uniquely well-documented war, just on the cusp of modernity, with gripping characters and human drama basically wherever you look.

To discuss all things Civil War, ChinaTalk interviewed Jeremy Neufeld, Director of Immigration Policy at IFP and author of an incredibly nerdy Civil War Twitter account, as well as Wayne Hsieh, a professor at the Naval Academy and co-author of A Savage War, an excellent new military history of the Civil War.

We discuss…

• How the Civil War played a role in America’s rise to superpower status,

• The impact of technological innovation on the war, including the telegraph, the steamship, and the railroad system,

• The Confederate invasion of Kentucky and other strategic missteps,

• Strategies for mobilizing industry and civil society for warfare,

• Differences in institutional culture between the Northern and Southern armies.

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Why is North Korea so weird? Is it Stalinism? Maoism? Japan-style emperor worship? Ancient Korean hermit kingdom energy? No, argues Jonathan Cheng, Beijing bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal and author of The Korean Messiah: The Failed Dynasty That Shaped the Hermit Kingdom. You’ve all been sleeping on the influence of 19th-century American revival Protestantism.

To discuss why Kim Il-sung kind of thought he was Jesus — or at least wanted to convince everyone else he was — we have the honor of Jonathan joining ChinaTalk today, with Alex Boyd.

Our conversation covers:

• Billy Graham meets Kim Il-sung — how America’s pastor visited Pyongyang in 1992 and bonded with the dictator over their shared Presbyterian childhoods, while touring a birthplace resembling the nativity story.

• From “Jerusalem of the East” to totalitarian theocracy — how 22-year-old missionary Samuel Moffett brought eschatological founder energy to the wickedest city in Korea, and transformed Pyongyang into the most Protestant city in Asia, complete with jazz clubs and a Chevrolet dealership.

• The Manchurian cauldron — how the lawless frontier of 1920s Manchuria blended Christianity, Korean nationalism, and Marxism to forge Kim Il-sung’s messiah complex — and why the 33-year-old decided to let peasants believe he could walk on water.

• Jim Jones, superfan — how the Jonestown cult leader became obsessed with Kim Il-sung, adopted Korean children, and traded tips with North Korean diplomats on running a closed religious society.

• Christianity as political technology — how Kim weaponized Protestant doctrine and ritual to build a state religion that has outlasted the Soviet Union by three decades.

Plus, why North Korea is best understood not as a nation-state but as a religious society, and what Hong Xiuquan and Xi Jinping have to do with any of this.

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How did China grow its EV industry? Hint: it wasn’t really central planning from Beijing. It was a magical concoction of entrepreneurs and local officials using their guanxi to dance around giant SOEs and central-government regulation, leverage private and foreign capital, and just be really excellent business people. That’s led to our situation in 2026 — world-beating companies that have a ton of overcapacity and are set to take over the planet.

To discuss, we have ANU Professor Fengming Lu, who recently wrote a fantastic paper in The China Journal, titled The Rise of China’s Electric Vehicle Industry: Strategic Alliances Between Local Governments and Private Capital, alongside Irene Zhang, contributor and analyst at China Talk. We also get into the lessons this story holds for other strategic industries like robotics and AI — plus a little detour into the Chinese podcasting ecosystem.

Our conversation covers:

• China’s automotive transformation from 130 small carmakers in the 1990s to the world’s most competitive EV industry.

• The rise of Chery, Geely, and other Chinese auto champions — how local connections, foreign technology, and creative financing helped them break into an industry dominated by state-owned enterprises.

• The downside of success — how China’s EV boom created an overcapacity problem.

• The role of guanxi and elite politics in deciding who gets to build cars.

• When Chinese EVs go global — record exports, overseas factories, trade tensions, and whether the same local-government playbook will shape the next wave of industries, from robotics to AI.

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Jake Newby is the author of the Concrete Avalanche Substack, which covers the best music coming out of China. If you enjoy this playlist, check out Jake’s sets from 2025, 2024, and 2023, as well as his Chinese shoegaze feature.

Tracklist:

1. ‘Undercurrent’ — Pu Poo Platter — from Undercurrent

2. ‘忧郁干杯乐园’ — the three mice — from where is my mice?

3. ‘错过的提醒’ — Lygort Quartet — from Through Voodoo Light to Shore of Tomorrow

4. ‘B1’ — gogoj aka Sheng Jie + Deng Boyu — from HEH

5. ‘心的傾訴 Jürêk tolƣawe (Unbosom Myself)’ —Mamer — from Bar xatteƣem, Bar ⱪayƣem (All the Joys, All the Pains)

6. ‘没东西可掏 The Well Is Dry’ — Zhang 'NoNo' Xingchan 张醒婵 — from Catch My Boomerang

7. ‘Gaia’s Breath’ — Wu Zhuoling 吴卓玲 — from Uncharted II

8. ‘the one sounds like sweet trip’ — Cassette Player Romance — from Meaning of Home

9. ‘黑天鵝(feat. LukeDaPlaya)’ — Guo Yinan 鍋一楠 and Yuan 猿 — from The Vortex Reconstruction Experiment

10. ‘Extinguished City’ — DEADTREES — from New World

11. ‘让我飞吧’ — Lie 劣 — from Landfill

For more information on each of these artists, check out the full write-up on Substack.

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Contest links: General $50k https://www.chinatalk.media/p/50k-chinatalk-submission-hiring-contest we're looking at submissions on a rolling basis!

AI evals: Due

Over the past few years, we’ve seen hints of policymakers and national leaders using AI models in their actual policy decision-making. The Prime Minister of Sweden said he uses it for second opinions on policy; the German Chancellor is testing it to draft legislation; even Trump said he had it re-write a speech at some point. It’s fair to assume that senior leadership across the world, and in Washington as well, have started using AI not just for tactical or operational tasks, but increasingly for broad strategic decision-making.

While that’s exciting — there’s the promise of uplift and smarter calls on some of the most consequential decisions leaders face in foreign policy and national security — we’re also flying blind. Enormous effort and energy goes into benchmarking and evaluation for things like coding. The experiments you can run to make models better at software development are much easier to execute and much lower-stakes than running a real experiment when you’re deciding whether to invade a country or sign a treaty.

That’s why we at ChinaTalk are trying to kickstart a field aimed at helping researchers and policymakers understand exactly what they’re working with when they ask these models to support some of the most consequential decisions they may make in their lifetimes. We’re launching an evals/essay project contest to explore this theme.

I’ve brought on two expert AI eval creators to discuss why the field is important, what interesting work has already been done on how models approach broad national-security and strategic questions, and how you — as an eval professional, semi-professional, or just a concerned person — can contribute new ways to poke and prod at these models and see what they can really do.

Joining us today: Florian Brand, research engineer at Prime Intellect, and John Chen, professor at the University of Arizona, who’s done some pretty wild things getting models to start nuclear wars with each other in Civ V.

Our conversation covers:

• How frontier labs are hitting eval-building limits — they’ve gone from undergrads to PhDs to field experts, and the models are now catching the experts’ mistakes.

• How Civilization V exposes AI’s strategic blind spots (terrible second-order reasoning) and models’ distinct strategic personalities (Claude’s really into science!).

• Why ethical prompting in Civilization V still doesn’t stop models from launching nukes.

• Jordan's PresidentBench eval, where a Chinese model was nonchalant about a Taiwan invasion, while Claude wanted to keep Taiwan free and independent.

• Advice for designing better AI evals and ChinaTalk’s new essay/evals contest!

  
  

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Six months into the war with Iran, the United States has fired 850 Tomahawks, emptied its LRASM and JASSM-ER inventories, expended essentially every ATACMS and PrSM in the arsenal, and burned through the SM-6 and PAC-3 interceptors it had been stockpiling for a fight with China. The administration's position is that the munitions are fine and the people saying otherwise are committing treason.

Bryan Clark is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a former submarine officer who runs war games for the Navy and its allies. Justin McIntosh is a retired Army Special Forces soldier — twenty years in, sixteen of them as a Green Beret — who now writes Mind of Things on defense, technology, and foreign policy.

We discuss…

• Why 850 Tomahawks in two months emptied the stockpile that was meant for China
• The leak hunt at Camp David, and why it should be a very short list
• How "lethality" became a testosterone prescription instead of an ammunition line item
• Japan's new defense strategy, which finally names China out loud — and bets on one-way attack drones
• Whether AUKUS Pillar 1 is quietly consuming the rest of the Australian military
• Why manned-unmanned teaming keeps failing in the war games, and what the CCA program got wrong

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The FCC has spent the past year quietly rewiring the American import market, first routers, then drones, next undersea cables, and as of last week, robots.

Adam Chan is national security counsel and senior advisor to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, and directs the agency’s new Council on National Security. He previously clerked on the Second Circuit and served as a national security legal fellow for the House Select Committee on China. ChinaTalk’s Aqib Zakaria co-hosts.

We discuss…

• How the covered list works

• The case for “simple and stupid” rules over big-brained ones with endless carve-outs

• Onshoring plans, allied carve-outs, and the 65% domestic content test

• Why robot vacuums got swept in alongside humanoids

• How AGI-pilled you have to be for the robot rule to make sense

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