ChinaTalk

Jordan Schneider
ChinaTalk
Latest episode

514 episodes

  • ChinaTalk

    The American Federal Civil Service: A History

    31/03/2026 | 58 mins.
    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, engineers, agronomists — made the U.S. bureaucracy arguably the most capable in the world.


    From expertise to org charts — How mid-century functional reorganization hollowed out mission-driven agencies and replaced subject knowledge with process management.


    What competence delivered — From agricultural breakthroughs to infrastructure build-out, what a serious, technically grounded civil service was able to accomplish.


    Whether we can rebuild — DOGE, the abundance movement, state capacity, and why this might be the best time in decades to make the government work again.

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  • ChinaTalk

    Jen Pahlka on an Optimistic Vision for Government Renewal!

    27/03/2026 | 59 mins.
    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).
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  • ChinaTalk

    Second Breakfast: We Negotiate with Bombs, War by Brainrot

    25/03/2026 | 53 mins.
    Full house with Bryan, Eric, Tony and Justin.
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  • ChinaTalk

    Overfit is now ModelTalk! GPU Smuggling, OpenAI Cooked? + Open Models, AI Writing

    23/03/2026 | 41 mins.
    Nathan Lambert of https://www.interconnects.ai/ and Jasmine Sun of https://jasmi.news/ catch up.
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  • ChinaTalk

    Second Breakfast: Taking Kharg Island, Terrorism, Grift

    20/03/2026 | 1h 18 mins.
    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 too late is a recipe for catastrophe


    "How are you going to take Kharg Island? You have no ships in the Persian Gulf."


    Why "lethality maxim" is not a theory of victory and the Iranians know it


    "A focus on a gunfight is why we're in this strategic mess to begin with. There's no amount of successful engagements that will become strategically meaningful if you don't have a vision of victory."


    The NCTC resignation, its anti-Semitic undertones, and the hollowing out of American counterterrorism infrastructure


    "An institution that was designed to fix the leaks that gave rise to 9/11, staffed with extraordinary analytic capacity, started chasing the Sinaloa cartel."


    Whether Iran can strike the US homeland — and why the dog hasn't barked


    "Did we build a titanium golem that was really a clay monster? Did we dramatically overestimate this operational capacity?"


    The naval escort nightmare: how keeping the Strait open would consume the entire destroyer fleet and gut Pacific deterrence


    "If you do this escort operation, it's going to take every available destroyer on the East Coast and in Europe for the duration."


    DHS corruption, Corey Lewandowski's hundreds of millions, and why American grift has graduated to a new level


    "Even in somewhere like China, you still have to kind of hide it. You can't just be tweeting out the deals that you're making to make yourself billions of dollars."

    Song: https://suno.com/s/FK4kifdAbVykiRax

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About 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/
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