Jordan Schneider, founder and editor in chief of the China-focused newsletter and podcast ChinaTalk, took the first guest slot on TBPN's return show. He covered why Chinese electric cars are so cheap, why he thinks American anger about data centers is homegrown rather than a Beijing influence operation, what DeepSeek's leaked internal transcript reveals about its founder, and why two generations of Chinese military leadership have been purged. The news discussion the hosts ran before he came on is covered in a separate summary.
👤 Guest: Jordan Schneider, founder and editor in chief of ChinaTalk, a newsletter and podcast on Chinese technology and policy
🎙️ Hosts: John Coogan and Jordi Hays, who present TBPN live on X and YouTube every weekday
📰 Published: 31 August 2026 on YouTube (TBPN)
🔴 YouTube | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Show notes | ⏱️ 2 hr 24 min | ✅ Time saved: 20 min
Key Takeaways
Chinese cars now cost about a third of the Western equivalent at the same quality, and that is the whole story
"It's like a huge consumer boon to have access to an automobile which is like, one third of the price with the same or if not better quality."
Fewer parts means fewer repairs: "I mean, they break less too."
The data center backlash is homegrown, and the evidence for a Chinese campaign is a handful of posts with three likes each
Social media reshaped America with nothing to protest against; a data center is a building you can stand in front of
"A whole lot of evidence, by the way, like years and years in the making of the Chinese government being extremely bad at doing foreign social media campaigns in The US."
He caught China's bot network by its office hours
Takedown data showed posting that tracked Beijing working hours with a gap in the early afternoon — "Everyone has nap time."
Cheap AI video is doing to Chinese media what cheap recording did to music
Scripts that would never have been greenlit are getting made and finding an audience on short video and Bilibili
China has no Joe Rogan because commentary on the news of the day belongs to the party
The blogging boom of the 2000s and early 2010s was shut down or cooled off
The only conspiracy lane left open is Han supremacy, because taking it down would offend the wrong people
DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng is the rarest thing in Chinese technology: someone arguing in public, and he did not mean to
He was transparent about using stolen Nvidia chips in a transcript he never wanted published, then pulled his IPO over the leak
"He's told his investors, I'm not here to make a profit. I'm here to make AGI."
Entrepreneurship is out and stable employment is in, including the army
Youth unemployment ran at "like 25%" before the government stopped publishing it, and civil service exam sittings keep climbing
The Western compute advantage is an order of magnitude and it caps what Chinese labs can charge
Capacity runs "like 15 to one, twelve to one", and the listed Chinese AI companies earn a few hundred million to a billion dollars — "and it's cute"
He has surrendered to the surveillance state, and thinks cheap cameras make troubled cities investable
"And you don't even need to be good at being a police officer."
Two generations of Chinese military leadership have been purged over rockets filled with water
"They were absolutely LARPing rockets." — and the Rocket Force is now asking the public for tips
Chinese Cars Cost a Third of the Western Equivalent, and That Is the Whole Story
Coogan opened by asking whether there was any car news out of China worth having after two weeks off. Schneider played a fourteen-second clip of a stunt driven in a Chinese car, then went straight at the Bugatti interview the hosts had just read out, in which Mate Rimac argued the top of the supercar market is turning back toward combustion engines and mechanical craft.
His counter is that the electric cars are simply better machines. A luxury watch is a safe indulgence in a way a car is not: "And when we get to the point where it's like, okay, the most dangerous thing you're doing is driving this car where you can take a thing which will absolutely not get you killed because it's like full self driving electric whatever. I think the calculus starts to change."
Coogan pushed back with the watch analogy — an Apple Watch will always tell the time more accurately than a Patek Philippe, and people buy the Patek anyway
Hays said the future of car enthusiasm is track time rather than road time, and Coogan agreed people will opt into the danger in a controlled setting
On the actual market, Schneider's answer was price. "Look, they're really cheap. That's just the crazy thing." Yes they are subsidized and yes China needs to export them, he said, but a car that costs $9,000 and feels like a $35,000 one is a different product category
The export math only fails where a country is protecting its own industry. Tariffs are going up in Europe and the cars are effectively banned in the United States, but for Malaysia or Indonesia, "It's like a huge consumer boon to have access to an automobile which is like, one third of the price with the same or if not better quality."
"I mean, they break less too. That's the cool thing. Like, you don't have to repair them because there's not a lot of stuff in it."
Coogan noted Rimac's own lineage runs the other way — he built the Rimac Nevera, an electric hypercar over $1,000,000 that beat a Model S Plaid to 60 — and has now decided the market is bifurcating
The Data Center Backlash Is Homegrown, and the Evidence for a Chinese Campaign Is Three Likes a Post
Coogan put the astroturfing theory to him deadpan — that Americans in fact love data centers and have had the wool pulled over their eyes by China. Schneider did not take the bait.
"Look, it's ridiculous. I think there are completely reasonable reasons for lots of Americans to be upset about these things, which is not to say that I agree with them." The buildings are the first physical thing people can point at. "But they are a physical manifestation of companies which, are talking about unemploying them", changing their lives and letting their kids cheat on their homework. When the social platforms reshaped the country there was nothing to picket: "There was no thing you could go out to like protest and like stand in your city council and say we stand against this."
Set aside the water, the power, the fact that they are ugly and that they buzz, he said — the complaints do not need a foreign author
The evidence being cited is thin. It rests on one OpenAI report catching influencers using a VPN and ChatGPT to generate anti-data-center images
"Those things got like three likes each."
Coogan put the scale of the operation at roughly 200 attempts
China Is Bad at Foreign Influence Operations, and He Caught the Bot Farm by Its Office Hours
"A whole lot of evidence, by the way, like years and years in the making of the Chinese government being extremely bad at doing foreign social media campaigns in The US."
He taught himself Python in 2019 to prove it. Back when Twitter took down state bot networks it published the full tweet archives, so the engagement and the timing were both visible
"There was this great graph I made of when they were when the tweets were going out and it lined up exactly with like Beijing work hours and there was a nap time from like one to 3PM."
"Everyone has nap time." — including, he said, the hardest-driving Chinese technology companies
"You get your KPIs in at 9PM and then you just kind of hang out."
Hays offered the structural reason the campaigns fail: genuine reach on a social platform cannot be bought or engineered. He said very smart founders whose whole job is solving problems would not be able to produce a viral post on demand for "$100,000,000"
Coogan teased him for having fallen for the learn-to-code meme, and Hays compared him to a Japanese soldier still fighting on a remote island
Cheap AI Video Is Doing to Chinese Media What Cheap Recording Did to Music
Schneider picked up Hays's point about how hard reach is, and said the more interesting thing is happening inside China's own platforms — short video and Bilibili, the country's YouTube analogue, have both been flooded with AI-generated video.
He reads it as encouraging rather than dystopian, and the comparison is music. The barrier to making something has collapsed, so more people are making things and the differentiation moves elsewhere
"Like the videos that are getting traction have really strong scripts, have scripts that would have never been made by like the sort of broader Chinese ecosystem." They respond to contemporary issues, he said, and have not been censored yet
The cost collapse is the mechanism. Visuals that would once have needed $50,000,000 of CGI work can now be generated by one person for about $5, and a creator who would never have had a $5,000,000 project greenlit is pulling a script off a hard drive and shooting it
The models only crossed the threshold of being exciting and useful in the past month, he said
He has not seen the same thing on YouTube or in Western short form, and is not sure whether that is the Chinese audience being more open to it
China Has No Joe Rogan Because Commentary on the News Belongs to the Party
Coogan raised Dwarkesh Patel's observation from his China trip: that the country has no equivalent of Joe Rogan, no household name freely opining on whatever happened that day.
Schneider's answer was one word. Who gets to comment on the news of the day? The party
"I think there was a real flowering of like Chinese blogging ecosystem, people with commentary accounts who are very smart, funny and engaging in the two thousands and early twenty tens."
"And all those accounts got shut down or they, cooled off a lot."
What is left are talk-show hosts who function as philosophers, or what Coogan called mindset influencers
One conspiracy lane is allowed to run. Han supremacy: "So there's this idea that like the Qing dynasty, which was the Manchus who came in the sixteen hundreds, like was illegitimate from the beginning because like Han people should never be oppressed by foreigners."
It is not taken down, he said, because it belongs to the constituency the state does not want to offend
The format itself is the problem. "But other than that, it's just the thing about a Joe Rogan is you have to be like discordant." You have to tell people something is fundamentally wrong and have an answer, and part of the act is saying politicians are full of it
DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng Is the One Founder Arguing in Public, and He Never Meant To
The leaked transcript is the rare artifact. Liang Wenfeng gave about three interviews in five years and then a private conversation got out
"He was really transparent about the fact that he was using stolen Nvidia chips, but that's the sort of public voice which is extremely rare to come across in Chinese discourse."
"And then he was so pissed that he pulled his IPO."
The reason he can say any of it is that he does not need anyone's money. Schneider compared him to Demis Hassabis if DeepMind had never sold, sitting on a quantitative hedge fund that throws off cash
"He's told his investors, I'm not here to make a profit. I'm here to make AGI."
The plan is to keep headcount small so the incentives stay clean, keep doing fundamental research and hope it works
What struck Schneider was not the science-fiction material. Coogan had asked whether the 2050 talk read like the 2025 AI-lab playbook now facing backlash in the United States; Schneider said the independence was the story
"It's like he's the one player in this ecosystem who's prioritizing, keeping his sort of like independence and research direction and not sort of being tied to a product roadmap or to a broader AI, a compute provider in China or like an Alibaba or Tencent, but he just like wants to be weird and do his own thing."
Even with that much protection — a billionaire many times over, on the national team, building something the country needs — he has been conditioned not to make his case openly. Schneider's point was that if it is true at that level, it is worse further down
Entrepreneurship Is Out, Big Firms and the Army Are In
Coogan asked what status games young Chinese graduates are playing now.
The recruiting polls are dull. "I mean, like people do polls about like, who gets to recruit the most Tsinghua graduates. The list is not surprising. Like the top labs, ByteDance, Huawei pay the most." They work you hard, he said
The pendulum has swung back from founding companies to joining big ones
The People's Liberation Army is now getting a better class of applicant, including graduates of top universities, because the job market is rough
Coogan said a friend who had spent time in China put it down to the state being able to compel top performers; Schneider disagreed and called it a labor-market effect
Youth unemployment was "like 25%" three or four years ago and then the government stopped reporting it
Civil service exam sittings are the other tell: "That's been rising pretty consistently over time."
"So to see that now like bleed into police and the military is a interesting I think side of the times because those are not high paying careers. Just ones that have more stability."
The Compute Gap Is an Order of Magnitude, and It Caps What Chinese Labs Can Earn
Coogan asked where DeepSeek will get chips over the next few years.
The ratio between the two ecosystems is the number that matters. "And there is capacity like 15 to one, twelve to one, and that's the thing that you can project out pretty clearly just kind of like doing a little doing some equations from like how much capex is being spent, how many how much equipment is being acquired, like yield rates, what have you."
Where does DeepSeek get chips? As much Nvidia as it can. The larger point is that the Western stack is far better capitalized with far more straightforward access to silicon, and Schneider put the advantage at an order of magnitude over at least the next five years
The revenue follows the compute. The listed Chinese AI companies are earning a few hundred million to about a billion dollars — "and it's cute"
"The reason of the reason that's the case is because they're not on the frontier of the technology, so they can't charge a premium and they're compute constrained."
One workaround is being tried. Coogan summarized it back to him: Moonshot going to Microsoft and Amazon to have its open-source models served on Western compute, with a revenue share on what sells. Schneider said exactly, and that whether the administration tolerates it is undecided
Hays asked whether anyone in China argues the state is not spending enough. Schneider said the state is already there — more and more government money is appearing on cap tables
"So you've started to see more and more state money coming into these companies' cap tables."
It cuts both ways for a founder: subsidies are welcome, an official telling you what to build is not
"Like the Chinese government, maybe fifteen plus years ago woke up to this idea that it needed to invest really substantially in the semiconductor ecosystem." — "We're starting to see real results come out of the likes of CXMT and SMIC and Huawei, of course."
The demand side, state money going into the labs themselves, only started about six months ago, and Schneider said the scale will not approach what Microsoft, Amazon, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic can pre-commit
Flock, the Panopticon, and Why Cheap Cameras Make Troubled Cities Investable
Hays asked whether China had seen anything like the American movement against Flock Safety cameras. Coogan level-set for the audience: Flock sells camera systems to police forces that feed a searchable database of license plates, officers have been caught using it to track ex-partners, and people are now cutting the cameras down with saws.
"I mean, I've sort of like emotionally surrendered to the Panopticon years ago." They are watching, he said, and there is nothing to be done about it
He relayed Tyler Cowen's investment case: be bullish on places with a public safety problem today, because the cost of dealing with petty crime is about to fall
Coogan compared it to New York in the seventies and eighties
"And you don't even need to be good at being a police officer." You show up and say you have the person on camera
On speeding he took the unpopular side, and enjoyed it. "I mean coming back to cars at the beginning, like I don't think speeding is good. Would like people to be caught when they speed."
"People with really nice cars, they get specific lawyers that get them out of every ticket so that they never need to deal with them."
Flying Cars: the Hosts Are Sold, Schneider Wants to Know Who Buys One
Coogan said he has been served Instagram ads for consumer eVTOLs — drones large enough to sit in — and that "They're selling them for like a $100,000 now." Hays pulled one up on screen: "You can buy this right now for a $120,000."
Schneider's question was the market. "What's the market for the eVTOLs besides like going to the Hamptons?"
He answered himself with traffic: "There was so much traffic, it took like forty minutes. I was like, you live like this?" on a two-mile drive in Washington
Coogan's case is that the drive-versus-flight time saving is the whole product, and that people with high opportunity costs will pay for it
Hays said the machines are already being used for agriculture, spraying crops
Coogan's hot take on flying cars: they have existed for a long time and are called helicopters; the point is bringing the price down
Schneider asked when the show would livestream from one
The Rocket Force Purge, and the Missiles That Were Filled With Water
Coogan closed by asking what the Rocket Force is and why it is soliciting public tips on procurement violations.
It is a Soviet invention China copied. Rockets got their own service alongside the army, navy, air force and marines; the United States answered later with the Space Force
"The Bloomberg, four years ago three, four years ago comes out with a story saying that half of the rockets in China are not filled with fuel but are filled with water."
"They were absolutely LARPing rockets."
The purges followed and have not stopped. Two generations of military leadership have been removed, and Schneider said the nine-person joint chiefs is now down to about a guy and a half
The tip line is the real news. "I mean, the it's biggest piece of the story is just that they had to go for public whistleblowers."
Coogan's version: had anybody bragged at the club about stealing rocket fuel, call this number
Schneider added that aggrieved former spouses are a live source, and not only for tracking cars
Hays had assumed the water was deliberate — a Potemkin arsenal meant to look bigger than it was, in the way Eisenhower was misled about Soviet strength. Schneider said no, it was theft
Schneider's bottom line is that the things people assume are directed from Beijing — the anger at data centers, the silence of Chinese founders, even the size of the missile force — are better explained by domestic incentives: a public with real grievances, an information system that punishes speaking up, and a procurement chain that stole the fuel.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
ChinaTalk (Schneider's newsletter and podcast on Chinese technology and policy, and the reason he was on)
Bugatti and Rimac (The CNBC interview the hosts had just read out: Bugatti's Mate Rimac says the supercar market is entering a "Swiss watch phase". He built the Rimac Nevera, the electric hypercar Coogan brought up against him)
DeepSeek (Liang Wenfeng's lab, funded off his own quant fund; the leaked transcript is the segment's centerpiece)
Nvidia (What DeepSeek runs on — Liang Wenfeng was "really transparent about the fact that he was using stolen Nvidia chips")
CXMT, SMIC and Huawei (Where Schneider says fifteen years of Chinese semiconductor subsidy is finally showing results)
Bilibili (China's YouTube analogue, flooded with AI-generated video alongside the short-video platforms)
Tsinghua University (The graduate-destination polls he cites; the top labs, ByteDance and Huawei pay the most)
ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent (The big employers, and the compute providers Liang Wenfeng has refused to be tied to)
Moonshot AI (The licensing experiment: open-source models served on Western compute with a revenue share, if Washington allows it)
OpenAI and ChatGPT (The report on influencers generating anti-data-center images with a VPN is the entire evidentiary basis for the astroturfing claim)
Flock Safety (License-plate cameras sold to police; the abuse cases and the saw-wielding backlash Coogan explained to the audience)
Tesla (The Model S Plaid, Coogan's benchmark for how fast the Rimac Nevera was)
Patek Philippe (Coogan's analogy for why craft survives better technology, which Schneider rejected on the grounds that a watch cannot kill you)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Liang Wenfeng's leaked transcript (The DeepSeek founder speaking in what he thought was private; the document Schneider spends most of the segment on)
Schneider's 2019 article on Chinese influence operations (The one he taught himself Python to write, charting bot-network posting against Beijing office hours)
Bloomberg's reporting on the Rocket Force (The story, three or four years old, that half of China's rockets were filled with water rather than fuel)
Get the latest market chatter as it happens:
If this saved you the listen, send it to one person who would rather have the time back.