Bonus: People Want Ducks - Country People With Credibility
You asked, we (well, Natalie) delivered: Tony Martin! In this first part of our interview with him, we discuss how Get This came to be, starting with Tony's time on Tough Love and how he caught the eye of Peter Harvie (not the guy from Canberra), and the first few months of the show. There's much...
How GPS Became a Weapon | Katherine Dunn
GPS is the rare piece of infrastructure most of us never think about until it fails — and it is failing more often, in more places, by design. In Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World, journalist Katherine Dunn traces the system from its Cold War origins — wartime radio beams, Vietnam'...
Ortiz’s War: The Most Decorated Marine in the OSS | Nicholas Reynolds & Katie S. Sanders
Peter J. Ortiz was the most battle-decorated member of the OSS, America’s wartime forerunner to the CIA, and one of the most decorated Marines of the Second World War. In 1944, the former French Foreign Legionnaire twice parachuted into occupied France to arm the Maquis, sabotage German lines, an...
A Rebel, a Traitor, and the Birth of the IRA | Rory Carroll
Before Bletchley Park, there was Reginald "Blinker" Hall, the Admiralty’s mercurial intelligence chief whose codebreakers read Germany’s wireless traffic during World War I, giving Britain a front-row seat to the plot behind the 1916 Easter Rising. His target was Sir Roger Casement: a diplomat kn...
The Nerd Reich | Gil Durán
Journalist Gil Durán spent years in political consulting before returning to reporting, and eventually, to the beat that became the subject of his book, The Nerd Reich. He joins Chris to lay out his case that a corner of Silicon Valley has turned against democracy itself — an ideology he traces f...
The Stay Behinds: Sweden’s Cold War Guardians | Johan Wennström
Beginning in 1949, officially non-aligned Sweden did something it kept secret for half a century: in close cooperation with the CIA and MI6, it built a clandestine civilian resistance network meant to outlast a Soviet occupation and fight on from within. Its members were ordinary people, farmers,...
Russia’s worldview, disinformation, and the politics of influence with Dave Troy
Every week, the Security Council of the Russian Federation publishes a digest of world events as Moscow sees them. Investigative journalist Dave Troy has been reading them closely, and he argues they matter not because they’re accurate, but because they show the story the Kremlin tell itself and ...
What the Next 10 Years Look Like: China, Russia, Europe and AI | Sam Lichtenstein RANE
Sam Lichtenstein, director of analysis at the global risk intelligence firm RANE, returns to walk Chris through RANE's 2025–2035 decade forecast: a multipolar world in which no great power has the will or the means to set the rules. The big calls include a China turned inward by economic and demo...
Podcast Update | This Weekend's Episode Coming Sunday
A quick programming note: this weekend’s episode will be out on Sunday, October 18, rather than our usual Saturday release. We’re taking an extra day in the edit on Matt’s conversation with national security reporter Joby Warrick about Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born militant who became on...
Carlos the Jackal and the Return of Terror for Hire | Joby Warrick
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Joby Warrick covered national security for the Washington Post for nearly three decades. In his new book, The Jackal, he turns to Ilich Ramírez Sánchez—Carlos the Jackal—the Venezuelan who in the 1970s and '80s was the most famous terrorist in the world. Matt talks ...
