Does America’s “China Consensus” Make Sense? A Debate (Robert Wright & Jordan Schneider)
Robert Wright's Nonzero
Nonzero
4.7 • 618 Ratings
🗓️ 7 August 2025
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
0:28 Jordan’s ChinaTalk podcast 3:01 Making sense of America’s “China consensus” 11:03 Are fears of Chinese global ambitions overblown? 29:51 The logic (or is it illogic?) of the AI arms race 33:14 China and the Ukraine War 41:30 Influence operations: Chinese vs American 46:24 China’s endgame re the US—and vice-versa 1:00:20 Is US China talk an echo chamber? 1:08:30 Heading to Overtime
Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Jordan Schneider (ChinaTalk). Recorded August 05, 2025.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero podcast. You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero Podcast. |
| 0:27.4 | Hi, Jordan. |
| 0:31.0 | Hello, Bob. |
| 0:32.3 | How you doing? |
| 0:33.3 | I'm doing it all. |
| 0:34.3 | Great to be here. |
| 0:35.2 | Big fan of yours. |
| 0:36.6 | Oh, I'll bet you say that to all the guys, |
| 0:38.4 | Jordan. But I'm a big fan of yours. Let me introduce this and explain why. So I'm Robert Wright, |
| 0:44.8 | publisher of 9-0 Newsletter. This is Non-Zero podcast. You are Jordan Schneider, |
| 0:49.5 | host of the China Talk podcast, which has become very prominent, and I would say influential. |
| 0:56.5 | So I'm very excited to be talking to you. And I've gotten a lot out of it. You recently |
| 1:02.3 | had an interesting two-part conversation on Xi Jinping's father with the author of a biography |
| 1:09.9 | on him that I found very interesting. |
| 1:13.1 | The other reason I'm excited to talk to you is because I think you would say, and you can |
| 1:16.8 | correct me right away if I'm wrong, but that you are a proud subscriber to what's |
| 1:22.3 | sometimes called the China Consensus in D.C. Maybe not exactly. We'll see. But anyway, I'm like a long way from being a |
| 1:30.4 | subscriber to it. So I'm interested in the presumably productive intellectual tension. We'll see here. |
| 1:41.9 | You know more about China than I do. So maybe by the end of this, I'll just be, I'll be totally on your page. We'll see here, you know more about China than I do, so maybe by the end of this, |
| 1:44.6 | I'll just be, I'll be totally on your page. We'll see. How does all that sound? |
| 1:52.2 | Sounds great. Let's get into it. Okay. Where are you, by the way? Physically, what, look? |
| 1:57.6 | I'm in New York City. Oh, yeah, yeah, I've heard of that. |
... |
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