ChinaTalk

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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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 build a drone war machine from scratch — from a handful of soldiers flying off-the-shelf drones to domestic assembly at a massive scale.


Ukraine’s industrial legacy and whole-of-society mobilization repurposed its civilian tech sector into a wartime industrial base.


Why modular design, frontline reassembly, and tight feedback loops allow Ukraine to iterate faster than traditional defense systems.


The constraints of global supply chains, the impact of export controls, and how China is playing both sides of the war.

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