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 the purgatory.

We discuss…

• Why Project Freedom collapsed

• A leaked CIA assessment putting 70% of Iran's ballistic missile capability still intact

• The Anthropic supply chain risk designation, Mythos, and the "call me" moment

• Four F-15Es down, 30 MQ-9s shot down, and why Jack thinks the Air Force was one inch from a televised POW disaster

song:https://suno.com/s/kBuJ4ruS5UkfTdY3

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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 Chinese translation train, he followed it up with a very different direction — a techno-AI thriller, All That We See or Seem, released late last year. Irene Zhang of ChinaTalk joins us to co-host.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Ken Liu argues that:

• Technology is the most human thing we do — humans have always externalized our minds into the world and then allowed those creations to reshape who we are.

• AI “slop” won’t stop humans from making art that matters, and the real distinction isn’t quality versus slop, but between desire-fulfilling machines and artists who draw from the collective unconscious.

• The deeper danger of AI isn’t machines replacing humans, but systems that train humans to behave like machines.

• Science fiction isn’t prophecy, but mythology — and ideologies are just mythology’s cheaper, hack cousins. Orwell, Shelley, Tolkien, and Le Guin endure not because they predicted the future, but because they gave us metaphors powerful enough to think with across generations.

• Large language models are intelligent, but can’t be wise. Drawing on Laozi and Zhuangzi, Ken explains why everything that truly matters lies beyond language.

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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 superiority over Iran, and the SEAD legwork no one wants to do

• Who actually benefits from the ceasefire and why Iran has the lower bar for reconstitution

Song: https://suno.com/s/wUhL26xyvUiklraY

We now have the songs on spotify! https://open.spotify.com/artist/3wltBV7tzUjci0vyTSv6h7?si=aVdBxNM7QVOknAXRakJZCg

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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 even invented
• (09:53) Dilution refrigerators, helium-3 from the nuclear stockpile, and whether mining the moon is actually a viable Plan B
• (17:43) Did the 2024 export controls backfire? Inside the case study of China going from zero to dominating dilution-refrigerator publications in two years
• (48:44) Lasers, photonics, and the Chinese supplier that reverse-engineered a Danish flagship — and is still selling into US labs under R&D tariff exemptions
• (1:03:45) Why quantum looks more like biotech than semiconductors: 90 companies, ~7 modalities, and the anthropology of an industry where everyone thinks their qubit is the right one

Constanza's report: https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/quantums-industrial-moment

The Quantum Throne song: https://suno.com/s/9kBx74ZqUHsgYiQ2

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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 Robinson (former OSC NCT and 101st Airborne, now a lawyer), and Tony Stark of breaking beijing.

We discuss…

• Why the Pentagon is leaking that the U.S. can't win a war over Taiwan — and what it means when the primes, INDOPACOM, and the deputy all scatter-shot the same message through the Washington Post
• The case for scrapping the legacy munitions portfolio — burning LRASMs on the Iranian Navy, the GPS-jamming Excalibur problem, and why locking in seven-year buys of Cold War weapons sets us up for the next round of failures
• A Special Forces master sergeant, $400,000, and the Polymarket Maduro bet — plus the hairdryer-next-to-a-thermometer scam at Charles de Gaulle, and why financial libertinism is "smoking in daycares"
• The firing of SecNav John Phelan — the waffle-bar bundler, the Golden Fleet fantasy, and how Stephen Feinberg captured the submarine program office and knifed his own Navy secretary

• A preview of the last two years of Trump II — DeSantis, Cotton, Chairman Rogers, and whether Congress flipping means more foreign adventurism or just acting secretaries all the way down

Song, "Phelan on the couch when it happened" https://suno.com/s/C0LmG53KdrT3evfe

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outtro music: Pardon Pen! https://suno.com/s/2tXSJ7uJFA7k1pUC

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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 simulate nature and solve specific classes of problems.

• Why Quantum Matters Now — Breakthroughs in error correction and hardware have shifted quantum from theory to an engineering race, with major implications for drug discovery, materials science, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity.

• The Economic and National Security Stakes — Quantum’s potential impact on cryptography, advanced manufacturing, biotech, and defense makes it a strategic technology with an extremely small margin for error in global competition.

• From Science Project to Industrial Policy Challenge — The bottleneck is no longer just physics but scaling. Talent pipelines, fabrication capacity, supply chains, and the kinds of public-private partnerships needed to move from lab prototypes to deployable systems.

• What Winning Looks Like — Leadership isn’t just building the first powerful machine. It’s shaping standards, securing supply chains, protecting encryption, diffusing capabilities across industry, and sustaining innovation in a tight U.S.–China technological race.

Plus, the encryption stakes, the engineering bottlenecks, the race with China — and a reading list and job resources for those interested in the field.

Thanks to the Hudson Institute for sponsoring this episode.

Zach’s Quantum Technology Reading List:

• Quantum Computing Fundamentals: But What Is Quantum Computing? by 3Blue1Brown

• Quantum Computing Overview: The Map of Quantum Computing by Domain of Science

• Quantum Sensing: Atomic Advantage: Accelerating U.S. Quantum Sensing for Next-Generation PNT by CNAS

• The Quantum-Classical Divide: Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve? by Philip Ball, Quanta Magazine (February 2026)

• Systems Engineering Bottlenecks: Computer Science Challenges in Quantum Computing: Early Fault-Tolerance and Beyond by Jens Palsberg et al., IEEE Quantum Week (2025)

Further reading if curious:

• When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut (2021)

• Introduction to Special Issue on the Early History of Nuclear Fusion by M. B. Chadwick and B. Cameron Reed, Fusion Science and Technology (2024)

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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, and why a Senate-confirmed deputy can now make American industry rise and fall

Hey God It's Dario song: https://suno.com/s/2d0u5eLbSyzDeDY3

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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 selling it on the Hill
• Whether AI eats the think tank or just the parts that weren't working anyway

Timestamps

00:38 — Applied think tank vs. white paper mill

16:56 — Partisanship: FAI's conservative tent vs. IFP's cross-partisan design

37:09 — Why researchers should do their own comms and outreach

50:26 — Betting on young talent as policy entrepreneurs

57:56 — Will AI eat the think tank?

song: https://suno.com/s/I244K1rIpPdB6lO9

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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 found 27-year-old bugs in code everyone thought was secure

• The offense-defense balance: whether a Ukraine with Mythos and a Russia without it changes the war

• Project Glasswing and Anthropic’s attempt to build a private-sector vulnerabilities equities process

• Why critical infrastructure patching is about to become a nightmare

• What happens when ransomware gets vibe-coded

• Why bio won’t be far behind

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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 pushing back

song: https://suno.com/s/uGE7Es3ELd6r8ao5

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