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This is a conversation with Patrick McGee, and it’s perhaps a bit of an unusual episode. Patrick is an author of a book called Apple in China tells the story of how the world’s most valuable company came to China to use it for its own benefit—only to discover, over time, that it was Apple being used, trapped, and effectively working for the Chinese state instead.

But despite the title, this isn’t just about Apple. It’s really a story of how China changed over two decades - how it gained leverage over Western corporations, squeezed them for everything from know-how to capital, and used them to build homegrown rivals now competing globally. It’s a story about how China uses economic dependency to build political influence and uses political influence to create economic dependency. And about how aggressive, smart and strategic China can be when pushing for its interests and how the West to its own detriment often fails to see that until it's too late.

Even though the story is from the perspective of a private company, the story is just as much about China, the West, and their relationship—which is why I think it’s deeply relevant for geopolitics.

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This is a conversation with Nick Hare, a former defense intelligence analyst in the UK government and a founder of a forecasting company Aleph Insights. But more importantly, he is what’s called a superforecaster - someone who is exceptionally successful in consistently predicting the future and far better at it than the average population or even government agencies and subject matter experts. 

It’s not about magic, instead it’s about mastering the science of forecasting based on filtering out the noise, choosing the correct information to focus on, correctly analyzing historical trends, avoiding biases and a lot more, to predict stock markets, global geopolitical events or basically anything else. 

It’s a fascinating field and we explain how it works, how he forecasted the Russian invasion of Ukraine or why governments and intelligence agencies fail to use these methods and tend to rely more on vibes rather than data. But more importantly, I take Nick’s exceptional forecasting skills and get him to forecast some of the key geopolitical events of the coming years that will end up shaping the world - from whether China will invade Taiwan or how will the war in Ukraine end. It’s a fascinating discussion and statistically, his answers are more accurate predictions of how these things will play out than you can find anywhere else in the world. 

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This is a conversation with Sergey Radchenko. Sergey is one of the most insightful historians of the Cold War and Russian history. He grew up in the USSR, has spent years combing through Soviet archives, and his latest book offers a rare inside look into how Soviet leaders actually made decisions about war, diplomacy, and the use of power. But this isn’t just about history because the past in Russia is still very much alive - and understanding what drove Soviet foreign policy shines a light on what drives Russian foreign policy today.

And so we talk about why Russia’s obsession with being seen as a great power still drives its decisions today, how Vladimir Putin’s worldview was shaped by Soviet collapse, and how much of his strategy mirrors what Soviet leaders did during the Cold War. We look at why Russia keeps acting like it’s still a superpower, whether Vladimir Putin is trying to rebuild the Soviet Union or what lessons policymakers can actually learn from how the West handled the USSR during the Cold War and much much more.

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This is a conversation with Robert D Kaplan - a legendary journalist, academic, and one of the most influential thinkers on US foreign policy and geopolitics of the past decades.

This year, he published a book called Wastelands in which he portrays a pretty grim diagnosis of why the world is increasingly becoming more and more unstable and dangerous, why is the United States but also Russia and China in decline that is only getting faster and why what’s coming is more chaos, more instability, violence and danger - as well, as what can we do to avoid it. We talk about all of that and much more - in what I think is pretty fascinating conversation.

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This is a conversation with Gregory Smith, a policy analyst at Rand focusing on the influence of AI and emerging technologies on geopolitics. And this was - and I hope I don't offend any of my other guests by saying - one of the most fascinating conversations I’ve ever had on the podcast.

Today, we are at a point when there’s a realistic chance that in the next decade or so we might get an AGI - artificial general intelligence or even ASI - artificial superintelligence: a next stage of AI that would be able to do everything that humans can and possibly even significantly better. If that happens it will radically transform every aspect of our lives but while the impact on other areas is widely discussed - how it might reshape geopolitics is largely ignored - even though its impact would be absolutely transformational. 

Greg and his colleagues at Rand recently published an extremely interesting paper where they for the first time try to explore what that might look like - and they present 8 different scenarios of how AGI can transform the global world order. Most of them are pretty bad but all of them are fascinating - leading to a rise of new superpowers, fall of the old ones and a fundamentally different world. And in this conversation, we discuss what that world might look like.

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This is a conversation with Anne Applebaum -  a historian focusing on Russia and Eastern Europe and one of the most respected thinkers on international relations, democracy and foreign policy in the world.

I used the opportunity to speak with her to make sense of what’s going on and where are we heading - from the US foreign policy and whether Trump is really turning on Putin, the future of US-Europe relations and about Russia and Ukraine: what’s driving Putin and what we still fail to understand about him, what can convince him to stop the war and how that might happen or what does the future of Russia look like.

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This is a conversation with Jakub Jajcay. Jakub has a very unique experience and perspective. He has served in several elite units in the Slovak military, once the Ukraine war started he volunteered and joined the Ukrainian military, serving as an infantry soldier and later in a drone unit on several combat tours. And today, he uses his own experiences from combat in Ukraine to draw analytical insights - about the war itself, about the changing character of warfare or about the lessons that NATO should be learning from it. The combination of his highly analytical mind and experience is quite special and it makes for a very rare and fascinating conversation.

We talk about why he thinks that FPV drones are overrated as someone who actually worked with them, how the reality of war differs from the media perception and what misconceptions most analysts have about what the war looks like, what’s the real level of quality of both Ukraine and Russian militaries, how would a typical NATO military perform if it was forced to fight in Ukraine against Russia, the real reason for why the Ukrainian big counter-offensive in 2023 failed and much, much more. 

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This is a conversation with John Dotson, director of the Global Taiwan Initiative,  former U.S. Navy officer and an expert on Taiwanese defense and security policy. There are a lot of discussions on Taiwan and its role in a potential conflict with China but quite often in these discussions, Taiwan actually is seen as a passive actor. We talk about a potential war between China and the U.S. over Taiwan - and overlook what role would Taiwan actually play - but its role and its decisions would be pretty fundamental. 

I wanted to explore it in more detail and so with John, we talk about how Taiwan is preparing for a war with China, why do people in Taiwan seem a lot less concerned about this than policymakers in the U.S., why is Taiwan criticized for not doing enough or for doing the wrong things or how likely is it that China could get Taiwan without actually needing to fight for it.

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This is a conversation with Ali Ansari, a professor and a founding director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews.
Professor Ansari has incredible insight and views on Iranian foreign policy, its domestic politics and the future trajectory of the Islamic Republic. And so we talk about how the 12 Day War changed the country, how will Iran change its grand strategy after the approach that it has pursued for three decades seems to have failed, whether it will now race to get a nuclear weapon or why he believes that a fundamental change of the Iranian regime has already started - and why the coming years will see the end of the regime as we know it.

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Thank you Conducttr for sponsoring the podcast. Take a look at Conducttr's services and its crisis exercise software at: https://www.conducttr.com

This is a conversation with Szabolcs Panyi, a Hungarian investigative journalist. I wanted to talk to Szabolcs because something remarkable has been happening in Hungarian politics. Viktor Orban, the prime minister who has ruled Hungary for over almost two decades is now for the first time ever, losing by a large margin in the polls to a new challenger.

The elections are less than a year from now and it’s starting to look more and more likely that Viktor Orban’s rule might be coming to an end. And so we discuss why - who is Orban’s new challenger, why is he able to succeed where so many before failed, and what would his victory mean for Hungary but also for Russia, Ukraine and European politics at large.