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 runaway AI. 

Host: 
Follow Jon: https://x.com/JonKBateman   

Guest: 
Connor Leahy: https://x.com/NPCollapse

Ukraine destroyed Russian strategic bombers deep inside Russia with help from a 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 Carnegie senior fellow and a former State Department official.  He joins Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to discuss his new book, Bytes and Bullets, and explain how drones are re...

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—for his new book, Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace You—and How to Stop It. 

He joins Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to reveal what he learned and make the case for a mass move...

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 Service, and he personally protected multiple presidents as a career agent. In his first-ever podcast, Ron joins Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to explain what’s different about today’s threats, how agents stay mentally focused, and why America...

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 original Luddites. He joins Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to explain what 19th century English craftsmen can tell us about AI, why he doesn’t lose sleep over Chinese models, and how to h...

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 context, Andy has emerged as the most influential debunker of data center myths.

He joins Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to compare ChatGPT prompts with microwaving a burrito and explain why a bestselling book overest...

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 Unpacked to explore U.S. pullout scenarios — up to and including Russian attacks on the Baltics. She and host Jon Bateman dig into Europe's historic rearmament, its chance to inve...

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 update on this crisis. Has the new supreme leader already decided to build a weapon? How quickly could Iran “break out” or “sneak out” to the bomb? And why does...

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 U.S. general who served as one of the Pentagon’s top China strategists and spent years living in the country. He joined Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to give a s...

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 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace—joins The World Unpacked to make sense of a region in flux. He explains why Washington should get tougher on Israel, Gulf countries may already have peaked in powe...

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, fueling the AI gold rush and remaking Stanford itself.

Theo joins Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to debate the deeper meaning of Stanford’s tech ties. Is it a normal and n...

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 the Ukraine War, says that Vladimir Putin has lost focus on running the country. She joins Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to explain the erosion of Russia’s social contract and share stories from her new book...

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 Bateman discuss Cuba’s economic vulnerability, its political staying power, and why Trump might wind up making a deal with the Castros very similar to one made by Barack Obama.

H...

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 with an Orb. On this episode of The World Unpacked, Nick joined host Jon Bateman to explore the brewing authenticity crisis, the geopolitics of privacy, and the surprising legacy of a 1993 New Yo...

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 that Musk has pioneered a new form of capitalism that fuses technology with political power.  On this episode of The World Unpacked, authors Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarno...

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 democracy scholar with deep ties in Hungary, joins Jon Bateman on a special episode of The World Unpacked.  Tom explains why Orbán lost, why his successor Peter Magyar isn’t the...

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 Peace, a premiere foreign policy think tank. He joins host Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to pull back the curtain on this hidden world. Tino takes on the skeptics and makes an impassioned case for an “idea sector”...

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 Great Power Opportunity. He joined Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to explain why Beijing hasn’t saved Iran; what Washingto...

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 on this hidden world. In this episode of The World Unpacked, Katrina tells host Jon Bateman about the creation of America’s AI war machine, the rise of Palantir, and the fully...

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 answer these questions. On this special episode of The World Unpacked, Karim and host Jon Bateman go inside Tehran’s power structure as the Islamic Republic faces one of the greatest...

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 the curtain on hidden ways that powerful people network together to advance their own interests and evade accountability.

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 inbox, here

Follow Jon on X: https://x.com/JonKBateman   

The Paveway bomb, invented by Texas Instruments in the 1970s, was the first truly precise munition.  It revolutionized America’s air campaign in Vietnam and allowed whole new kinds of “limited” U.S. wars in Libya, Iraq, Serbia, and beyond.

But Paveway’s true legacy was psychological: it seduced generations of U.S. leaders into believing that tactical precision creates strategic victories with few costs.

Jeff Stern, an intrepid chronicler of modern conflict, tells this story in his new book The Warhead: The Quest to Build the Perfect Weapon in the Age of Modern Warfare.  He joins J...

You’ve probably heard of “lab-grown meat,” the sci-fi-sounding idea of 100% real meat made without animals. Yet few people understand how close this vision is to becoming reality—and how much it could change the world.  A healthier, more efficient meat source could soon rewire global supply chains and help catalyze a new bioeconomy.

Find the episode transcript and streaming audio, and get the show direct to your inbox, here: https://carnegieendowment.org/podcasts/the-world-unpacked/the-global-race-to-reinvent-meat?

Follow Jon on X: https://x.com/JonKBateman  

Drones are no longer the future of war. They’re now a defining weapon in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and beyond—altering the course of conflicts and reshuffling the balance of military power. The pace of change has caught many by surprise, with state and non-state groups racing to mass-produce, diversify, and protect their rapidly evolving drone arsenals.

Find the episode transcript and streaming audio, and get the show direct to your inbox, here: https://carnegieendowment.org/podcasts/the-world-unpacked/every-war-is-now-a-drone-war?

Follow Jon on X: https://x.com/JonKBateman  

The Trump administration apparently seeks regime change in Venezuela and may soon attack the country. But American leaders have so far refused to openly state their intentions, stifling public debate on the momentous choice ahead.

In an urgent conversation you won’t hear elsewhere, the last U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela makes a forthright case for ousting President Nicolás Maduro—with American force, if necessary.

Ambassador James Story joins The World Unpacked to argue that Venezuela isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan. Host Jon Bateman asks him tough questions about post-war security, regional blowback, and whether...

The new U.S. National Security Strategy is the clearest and boldest statement of President Donald Trump’s global vision. It reveals U.S. plans to dominate Latin America, transform politics in Europe, and seize commercial opportunities in Asia. Leaders around the world are closely studying this document.

Find the episode transcript and streaming audio, and get the show direct to your inbox, here: https://carnegieendowment.org/podcasts/the-world-unpacked/decoding-trumps-foreign-policy-blueprint?

Follow Jon on X: https://x.com/JonKBateman  

The AI boom is the biggest investment mania in decades, channeling trillions of dollars into data center infrastructure.  If investors bet right, they may usher in technological breakthroughs that produce vast wealth.  If they’re wrong, they could crash the U.S. stock market, trigger a recession, and spread financial contagion globally.

Ed Zitron was among the first to call AI a bubble.  His unsparing deep dives into AI finances are must-reads, even for his critics.  In a spirited back-and-forth on The World Unpacked, Ed and host Jon Bateman debate Wall Street’s “unhealthy relationship” with Nvidia, if China has...

We’re living through an era of information disruption.  Novel technologies like AI and social media are unleashing pent-up social and political energies—releasing floods of new information and triggering intense battles for narrative control.

While most analysts focus on small pieces of this puzzle, Alicia Wanless is a pioneering “information ecologist” who seeks to map the entire system. Her new book is The Information Animal: Humans, Technology, and The Competition for Reality.

In a lively new episode of The World Unpacked, Alicia and host Jon Bateman discuss what 2025 has in common with 1625, how novels...

On November 5, the Supreme Court heard the most globally consequential oral arguments in years as Trump’s trade war faces a final legal reckoning. The Court will either strike down most of Trump’s tariffs, undercutting him in trade talks, or else hand U.S. presidents previously unimagined new powers over the global economy.

Peter Harrell is a top trade expert and lawyer fighting the tariffs on behalf of 207 members of Congress.  He joins host Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to take stock of the ever-changing tariffs, peer into the Justices’ decision-making process, and predict the fallout...

A House of Dynamite, a new Netflix film, may be the most realistic depiction of a nuclear crisis ever made. Screenwriter Noah Oppenheim partnered with Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker) to capture the intimate details of the U.S. national security state as a president (Idris Elba) and his advisors confront the riskiest 19 minutes in human history.

Oppenheim, the former president of NBC News, joins Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked. They discuss Trump’s missile defense plans, the filmmaking process, and Hollywood’s surprising influence on nuclear policy—from Dr. Strangelove to Cri...

MS-13 brought El Salvador to its knees and has spread to a dozen other nations, doing battle with presidents as much as rival gangs. Yet despite its infamy, MS-13 is poorly understood: It has little in common with the cartels, traffickers, or mafias that it’s often lumped in with.

What is the violent logic behind MS-13, and why has it grown steadily more powerful during both crackdowns and truces? Has President Nayib Bukele’s unprecedented brutality finally turned the tide against MS-13 in El Salvador, and does he have a plan for what comes next? If it t...

The end of USAID was among the biggest early controversies of President Donald Trump’s second term. The world watched in horror as Elon Musk’s DOGE took a chainsaw to U.S. foreign assistance, placing millions of lives at risk with brutal across-the-board cuts.

But few people realize how much has changed since then. Behind the scenes, aid money was largely restored—for now. And instead of making grandiose fraud accusations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has begun embracing aid in public, laying out promising plans to address problems long recognized by technocrats.

Rachel Bonnif...

Brazil’s Supreme Court has just convicted former president Jair Bolsonaro of attempting a coup to nullify his 2022 election loss. The country’s judicial system and Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a polarizing figure whom the co-conspirators had sought to assassinate, acted boldly, sentencing Bolsonaro to twenty-seven years in prison.

Brazil is now the global leader in democratic accountability for “self-coups,” a once-rare phenomenon that has surged recently, even in places such as South Korea and the United States. That’s why the world is watching Brazil’s grand experiment—especially in Washington, where President Donald Trump has levied massive...

Nate Soares is one of the world’s leading AI “doomers” and co-author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All—the New York Times Bestseller that everyone in tech is debating. In this debut episode of a revamped The World Unpacked, new host Jon Bateman talks to Nate about his provocative argument that superintelligent AI could destroy all humans in our lifetimes—and how the U.S., China, and other countries should band together to stop it.

What is superintelligent AI and how soon will it emerge? Why are tech companies...

In this episode of The World Unpacked, host Isaac Kardon is joined by Alexander (Sasha) Gabuev, Director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin and one of the world’s leading experts on Russia-China relations. Together, they unpack the growing geopolitical competition in the Arctic—a region increasingly shaped by strategic cooperation between Russia and China, and generally neglected or misunderstood by U.S. policymakers.

This conversation dives deep into the overlooked maritime theater connecting the U.S., Russia, and China. Kardon and Gabuev explore the security implications of a warming Arctic, the dynamics of great powe...

Subsea cables carry 95% of the world’s data—but remain largely invisible in global policy debates. In this episode, Isaac Kardon is joined by Carnegie experts Jane Munga and Sophia Besch to unpack the geopolitics, economics, and security risks surrounding undersea data infrastructure. From Africa’s digital development to Europe’s hybrid warfare concerns, they explore who owns these cables, why they matter, and how governments can respond to emerging infrastructure threats.

Notes: