ChinaTalk

Africa is the literal center of the world’s map and increasingly the center of gravity for ISIS, the manpower source for Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the contested geopolitical ground where China builds bases and drops off free weapons. Our first active-duty guest pulls back the curtain on a combatant command that runs on 0.1% of the defense budget.

LTG John W. Brennan Jr. is Deputy Commander of U.S. Africa Command and a 30-year career Special Forces officer, with command tours spanning 5th Special Forces Group, the anti-ISIS task force in Syria, and 1st Special Forces Command. He’s joined by ChinaTalk’s Justin, who served under Brennan as a young NCO in the Middle East.

We discuss…


How AFRICOM runs a counter-VEO away game on 0.1% of the defense budget by working “by, with, and through” partners


“Putin’s Purse”: trafficking thousands of Africans onto the Ukrainian front lines under false pretenses


The Houthi–al-Shabaab pipeline and the threat triangle around Djibouti’s PRC naval base


Building an “alternate DIB in exile”: drone centers of excellence in Morocco, South African artillery, Namibian satellite radios


Why Brennan wants to “declare jihad against proprietary data streams” and where AI actually helps a combatant commander decide

WarTalk's first Ivorian dance party suno song: https://suno.com/s/1hhJTtwBn2NGR8eT

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pope Leo has called AI the single greatest challenge facing humanity. Not war, not poverty, not climate change. So we got a panel together to sort out what this encyclical means.

Joining Jordan are Tim Hwang, deputy director of the Institute for Christian Machine Intelligence, John-Clark Levin of Kurzweil Technologies, and ChinaTalk's resident Catholic, Aqib Zakaria.

We discuss…

Why the encyclical's claim that AI cannot truly "understand" is a narrow theological term of art, and why that nuance gets lost on Twitter

Pope Leo's call to "disarm AI" and the Holy See's potential role mediating between the US and China and speaking for the global South

Tim's pitch for a Vatican alignment lab that buys GPUs and tries to beat Anthropic's benchmarks from Christian first principles

Why frontier-lab researchers, including non-believers, are treating the Pope as a moral coordinating signal

How Anthropic drifting from deontology toward virtue ethics in training Claude looks like a validation of the Christian approach

The provocation underneath all of it: is the American AI stack a Christian AI stack?

pope as chicago footwork: https://suno.com/s/1Qb9Ce3Bh6saeF2V
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do you evaluate an AI model for a war you can only fight once? Ike Harris, a Naval officer turned Hill staffer turned AI policy operator, joins the show to discuss his effort to bridge the gap between the labs that build frontier models and the operators who'll deploy them.

Ike Harris is the executive director of the newly launched Frontier Security Institute, and was most recently the Republican tech lead on the House Select Committee on the CCP, with prior stints in OSD and as a surface warfare officer.

We discuss…


The GAIN AI and Overwatch acts: and Congress's most aggressive attempt to wrest export-control authority from the executive branch since the Cold War


Why you can't just "buy AI": and why national security evals look nothing like the SWE benchmarks the labs optimize for


Strategic-level evals :for problems you can't run ten times, from Iran negotiations to targeting at the COCOM level


China's robot-army advantage: open-weight models at the edge, Ukraine-style drone iteration soaked up via Russia, and a casualty tolerance the US can't match


The "no more NASA" problem: how risk tolerance, mission command, and law-of-armed-conflict constraints shape who wins the deployment race


Breaking into tech policy: Ike's case for why every aspiring policy person should spend a year on the Hill

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How did Arizona lock in billion-dollar investments from TSMC, Intel, and LG Energy?

Ian O’Grady, Senior Policy Advisor to Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, joins ChinaTalk to share war stories from the state that’s successfully reshoring semiconductor and battery production.

Our conversation covers:


Labor Disputes and Crisis Management — How the Governor’s Office mediates disagreements between stakeholders and keeps workers happy.


Clean Air Act vs. chips — Why Arizona’s fabs struggled to get building permits despite the state’s low per-capita emissions.


Arizona’s Abundance Playbook — Including a consolidated commerce authority, a culture of engineering > litigation, and institutional factors that help Arizona outbuild Ohio and Texas.


Taiwanifying the Desert — How Phoenix welcomed TSMC engineers with Mandarin programs in schools, Din Tai Fung, and a new Costco.


Industrial Policy Resource Wars — How Arizona avoids backlash based on power and water use concerns.

Co-hosting is ChinaTalk researcher Aqib Zakaria.

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rob Lee dials in from Ukraine for a long-form WarTalk on what the front line actually looks like in year four — where infantry sit underground for six months without seeing the sun, where 2% of casualties come from small arms, and where the "forward line of troops" has been quietly replaced by a forward line of UAV teams.

Rob Lee is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and one of the most-read analysts of the Russia-Ukraine war; he's joined on the show by WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark, Tony Stark, and Justin.

We discuss…


The six-month infantry rotation and what isolation, drone threat, and zero-line resupply do to a human being


Why Ukraine has reclaimed the drone edge — and what the Hornet, Bumblebee, and FP2 are doing to Russian logistics


Ukraine's new corps structure, where the brigade-only model broke down, and what the Azov-derived elite corps look like


Why 2% of Ukrainian casualties come from small arms and what infantry are actually doing on the zero line


Starlink as the indispensable game-changer — and Russia's increasingly serious attempt to jam it


Combat casualty care when CASEVAC takes 12 hours, the golden hour is dead, and tourniquets sit on for a month


What the Marine Corps should steal from Ukraine — pushing Hornets to the battalion, Bumblebees to the company, and giving up something to make room

this ep's a little too dark for a suno song
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices