The World Unpacked

How dangerous is superintelligence? Connor Leahy, a former open-source LLM builder and current AI safety advocate, argues that the threat is existential. On The World Unpacked, Connor Leahy joins Jon Bateman to outline why he sees superintelligence as a national security emergency and how a deterrence-based “trust but verify” approach, modeled on nuclear arms control, could be the solution to runa...

Ukraine destroyed Russian strategic bombers deep inside Russia with help from former DJ, a tattoo artist, and cheap drones hidden in trucks. What does that say about who holds power when drones are everywhere? Has China already caught up with the U.S. in technology? And what happens when a single private company can switch off the communications a military depends on?   Steven Feldstein is a...

Even as AI dominates the headlines, the gulf between what insiders know and outsiders believe has never been wider.  Those closest to the technology have the grandest hopes and fears for rapid, large-scale automation of work and daily life.  Garrison Lovely interviewed hundreds of AI insiders—including Nobel Prize winners, lab leaders, whistleblowers, forecasters, and prophets of doom—fo...

With political violence on the rise and new weapons like drones proliferating, is it still possible to protect America’s leaders?  Why has such a basic governmental mission been overstretched and underfunded?  Which is the bigger threat—invisible “lone wolves” among us, or nation-states like Iran who openly threaten assassinations?  Ron Rowe was acting director of the U.S. Secret Se...

People are worried that AI will automate their jobs. Yet Brian Merchant has interviewed hundreds of workers disrupted by AI, and what he sees isn’t a technological revolution but a centuries-old power struggle: bosses wielding new tech as leverage to deskill and destabilize workers. Merchant is a tech journalist and critic whose book, Blood in the Machine , gives a sympathetic history of the origi...

Data centers may be the most controversial objects in America. They’re blamed for draining water reservoirs, stressing electrical grids, and driving up utility bills.  Communities throughout the country are pushing back and seeking moratoria. But Andy Masley says this is all wrong—that data centers aren’t especially resource-hungry. Through his dogged research and insistence on putting numbers in...

NATO’s future remains in doubt as Donald Trump again threatens to pull U.S. troops from Europe. But the practical stakes of these debates aren’t always clear. What military capabilities does Europe stand to lose? How long would it take to replace them? And how might Russia exploit any gap?  Sophia Besch, a German expert on European defense policy who has worked inside NATO, joins The World Unpacke...

The U.S. and Israel just fought a second war over Iran's nuclear program—and one of the world's leading nuclear experts says America lost. Iran's uranium stockpile sits fully intact in tunnels too deep to reach, and Tehran walked away with more leverage in nuclear talks. James Acton, a physicist and longtime analyst of Iran’s program, joins host Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to give a detailed...

A U.S.-China war over Taiwan would be catastrophic for all sides and the world. Preventing such a war requires understanding how it might unfold—from start to finish—including worst-case scenarios.  How much warning would there be? Where might China strike first? Which countries join the fight? Can Taiwan defend its coasts? Would nuclear threats determine the outcome?  Charles Hooper is a retired...

The wars unleashed by October 7th have left the Middle East deeply fractured—Iran battered and defiant, Gaza destroyed, Israel militarized, the Gulf insecure and divided. And an even bigger disruption lies just ahead: the oil revenues that built the modern Arab world will halve by 2050, forcing countries to redesign themselves.  Marwan Muasher—a former foreign minister of Jordan and now a VP at th...

Theo Baker is no ordinary college senior. His student newspaper articles brought down Stanford’s president. Now he’s written a book about the making of the young tech elite. How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University reveals the “Stanford within Stanford”—the unofficial pipeline linking Silicon Valley investors to top students. It’s a pathway to power unlike any other, fue...

Russia’s surprising recent Internet shutdown did more than disrupt daily life: it also crippled the regime’s own communications and propaganda. It’s one of a series of strange events—from a diminished Victory Day parade to crackdowns on businesspeople and celebrities—that suggest growing disorder and confusion within the Russian state. Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Moscow insider who quit over th...

There’s been remarkably little public debate about a potential U.S. attack on Cuba.  President Trump said last week that he “will be taking over” Cuba “almost immediately”—and similar threats led to military action in both Venezuela and Iran. Javier Corrales, a political scientist at Amherst College and the son of Cuban exiles, joins The World Unpacked to game out this crisis. Javier and host Jon...

AI-powered bots and slop content are everywhere now, making it harder to tell who’s human. Will the Internet become so bot-ridden that it’s simply unusable? Or will people be forced to prove their identities online—giving up privacy and eroding democracy? Nick Pickles battled bots at Twitter and is now chief policy officer at Tools for Humanity, the Sam Altman-founded startup that reads eyeballs w...

Elon Musk is one of the most influential figures of our era.  He remade the space, car, social media, and AI industries.  He shaped the Ukraine War.  He helped put Donald Trump back in office and became Washington’s most powerful official.  How can one CEO alter the fate of multiple nations—and what does that say about our world? A provocative new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed , argues...

The world is still making sense of Viktor Orbán’s historic election loss in Hungary—a small country with outsized global significance.  Why were Orbán’s generational efforts to stack the electoral deck not enough to prevent his landslide defeat?  Is this a warning sign for right-wing populists in America, Europe, and elsewhere who’ve modeled their own movements on Orbán’s? Tom Carothers, a top dem...

Think tanks—the non-profit research centers that try to influence policy—are strange and mysterious places.  Depending on who you ask, think tanks are invaluable sources of expertise, intellectual hired guns serving powerful interests, or relics of a bygone era when facts mattered and political leaders actually read things. Tino Cuellar is president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peac...

President Trump was meant to fly to Beijing this week for major trade talks, but instead he’s staying home to manage the Iran War. It’s an apt metaphor for America’s decades-long failure to refocus on Asia and reckon with China’s rise. Does Trump have a plan for dealing with America’s top rival? If so, what is it? Ali Wyne is a perceptive analyst of U.S.-China competition and author of America’s G...

The U.S. is fighting its first full-scale AI war in Iran — but key details remain largely hidden from Americans and the world. Which military decisions are being automated? How well does AI really perform on the battlefield? Can guardrails prevent fatal errors? Katrina Manson’s timely and deeply reported new book, Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare, lifts the lid...

The Iran War marks the second time in two months that Donald Trump decapitated a country without real legal justification.  But is this any different from the many times that past U.S. presidents—and other great powers—have violated international law?

Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei was killed almost a week ago — so who’s running the country? Will Iranians seek change in the streets, despite the brutal crackdown they faced in January? Could Kurdish militias march on Tehran under U.S. and Israeli air cover? Should Westerners trust exiled oppositionists like former crown prince Reza Pahlavi? Karim Sadjadpour is one of the few people who can an...

Just weeks after ousting Venezuela’s leader, Donald Trump is now courting crises on two other continents.  Trump’s quest to own Greenland continues to roil Europe, while the Middle East braces for war as a U.S. armada barrels toward Iran.

In this episode of The World Unpacked, Sarah tells host Jon Bateman why systemic corruption looks nothing like how we picture it, how anti-corruption advocates are co-opted as enablers, and what to say if someone asks you for a bribe. There’s a gnawing feeling in America and the West that a self-serving elite has corrupted society’s rules in its favor. The Epstein files have finally pulled back th...

The same populist forces that brought Donald Trump to office could also enable a politician from the progressive left to succeed him. How would a president in the vein of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Zohran Mamdani change U.S. foreign policy and the world? 

Americans have been deeply dissatisfied with the economy for many years, even as standard metrics continue to show strength and prosperity. This gap between popular and elite thinking has helped populism surge and sparked intense debates about whether old economic assumptions—and policies—need wholesale revision. Find the episode transcript and streaming audio, and get the show direct to your inbo...