Nathan Leamer’s Twitter bio is only ten words long: “Suburban Dad. Work at intersection of tech and public policy.” He’s being too modest. Leamer is executive director of a group called Build American AI, which is backed by the super PAC Leading the Future, which in turn is backed by people like OpenAI President Greg Brockman (to the tune of $25 million) and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (via his VC firm A16Z) and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.

Though Leamer seems not inclined to talk about his job, his Twitter feed offers some clues about his duties. One of them, apparently, is depicting influential critics of AI in a negative light. This week Sen. Bernie Sanders hosted a livestream conversation called “The Existential Threat of AI and the Need for International Cooperation.” Joining Sanders were two American AI safety advocates and two AI experts from China—one from Tsinghua University (aka “China’s MIT”) and one from the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance. Leamer tweeted this analysis: “Bernie Sanders decided to let 2 members of CCP-controlled organizations zoom into his anti innovation party at the Capitol.”

Leamer also circulated commentary by other analysts. One tweet he retweeted said that 20,000 people had tuned in “to watch a US Senator cater to the CCP on AI innovation in the US.” Another said: “Incredible to see a US senator endorsing America’s surrender to China.”

I think I sense a theme developing…

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To understand why this theme will keep developing—why you’re going to see more critics of AI implicitly or explicitly cast as traitors, and why people like Brockman and Andreessen and Lonsdale underwrite this stigmatization—you have to understand that US-China cooperation isn’t the only, or even the main, thing about Sanders’s AI agenda that bothers them.

Along with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders has proposed legislation that would pause the construction of AI data centers in the US until Congress enacts AI safeguards. And a cardinal principle of AI accelerationist rhetoric is that any regulation that could slow the development of AI poses a grave threat to America by handicapping it in its presumably existential race with China. Both Americans who joined Sanders in his livestream have been on the NonZero podcast, and one of them, Max Tegmark of MIT, said during our podcast conversation, “Companies in the US have found that by far the easiest way to avoid being regulated is just to say this two-word sentence: ‘But China!’ And then regulators back off.”

So, for Silicon Valley, a machine that smears advocates of regulation as unpatriotic is a dual-use technology: It discourages international agreements that could slow AI down and cut into revenue, and it discourages national regulation that could slow AI down and cut into revenue. Nathan Leamer is, among other things, part of that machine. I hope the job pays well.

And it should! It keeps him busy. When he’s not tweeting, he’s doing things like helping journalists with their research. This week, for example, he was quoted by New York Post columnist Lydia Moynihan in support of her assertion that “AI doomerism—the belief that advanced AI poses an existential threat to humanity—has quietly forged one of the stranger coalitions in modern politics. Socialists, Hollywood unions, Jan. 6 organizers and Chinese government officials are now aligned in trying to slow down American AI development under the guise of saving humanity.”

I don’t want to overdo the distinction between national and international regulation. With this technology, especially, the two are often connected organically. Even if you favor Sanders’s data center moratorium, you have to acknowledge that its effectiveness will be limited by the fact that data centers can be built abroad. Or, to take a proposal that would have a better chance of enactment than a data center moratorium: If you put a heavy tax on data centers, more data centers will be built abroad, so the tax will have slowed things down only modestly and so will buy us only a little more time to ponder and wisely calibrate AI governance. The natural solution would be an international agreement on a minimum data center tax; effective national governance would entail international governance.

This international tax idea isn’t as crazy as it may sound. The Biden administration pushed for an international minimum tax on multinational corporations to stem the “race to the bottom” that encourages countries to lower taxes in hopes of attracting companies. And 136 nations agreed to a 15 percent minimum tax!

The big and fatal obstacle—as is often the case with worthwhile international initiatives—was the US itself. But most of the domestic opposition came on the Republican side, and much of that came from MAGA Republicans—and many MAGA Republicans are alarmed about AI. (Hence that reference to “Jan. 6 organizers” in the New York Post.) On the same day Tegmark appeared on the Bernie Sanders livestream, he appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast. So maybe it’s not too wild a dream to imagine a left-right coalition that supports not just national but international AI regulation.

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Granted, it’s a pretty wild dream. MAGA Republicans are traditionally averse to global governance in general and cooperation with China in particular. Bannon, when cutting to commercial breaks, sometimes plays a song called “Take Down the CCP.” And I’m pretty sure that if we hold off on the international governance of AI until we see regime change in China, we’ll have waited too long. This week the New York Times ran a story about how helpful consumer-grade AI can be to the aspiring bioweapons maker—and pandemics, like many other bad things AI could foster, don’t respect borders.

Is McCarthyism too strong a word for the tactics of AI industry operatives like Leamer? Well, Leamer is certainly no Joseph McCarthy. He hasn’t, for example, tried to get anybody fired on grounds of ideology. And, Leamer aside, I don’t expect to see anything comparable to the Hollywood blacklists. Fear of China isn’t as intense or widespread as fear of Soviet communism became after World War II.

Still, trying to discredit people with groundless accusations or insinuations of aiding and abetting an enemy (real or imagined) is, among other things, antithetical to the principles of liberal democracy. (The House Un-American Activities Committee, whose investigation of Hollywood in the late 1940s foreshadowed McCarthy’s rise as a red-baiter, certainly earned its name!) Plus: The US tech industry—much to its benefit—includes many people of Chinese ancestry, and they should be able to choose and vocalize their positions in the AI debate without worrying that their ethnicity will make that endeavor particularly perilous. And even when Leamer’s cheap shots, as in this case, aren’t directed at people of Asian ancestry, they still help create an atmosphere in which that peril may be felt.

Few psychological forces are more corrupting of rational debate, or more conducive to oppression and persecution, than the suspicion that members of your tribe are in league with a tribe that’s been deemed an enemy. And this is an especially destructive force to unleash if you’re in the middle of a technological revolution which demands that humankind, for its own good, do a better job of transcending nationalism and other forms of tribalism than it’s ever done before. If I seem hypersensitive to signs of McCarthyism, part of the reason is that I think that’s what we’re in the middle of.

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PS I elaborate on my argument that the AI revolution demands a war on tribalism—and suggest some ways to fight that war—in the closing chapters of my book The God Test, which comes out next month. You can pre-order here if you’re so inclined.

Good news for President Trump! Since he was inaugurated last year there has been an increase in the number of Americans who think US influence in the world has been strengthening! What’s more, the final data point in the graph above comes from late March—nearly a month into the Iran war. So maybe Americans are rejecting the view, widely held abroad, that the war illustrates a declining American ability to use its power effectively. Or maybe, on the other hand, Americans who answered this survey question noted that it didn’t specify whether the influence was for good or ill.

In any event…

The graph below suggests that the war isn’t proving very popular among Americans. Trump’s attack on Iran brought a rally-round-the-flag effect, and so did the attempted attack on Trump last week. But the first of those two effects faded entirely, and the second is showing signs of doing the same.

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0:00 How powerful is Anthropic’s Mythos?
6:52 How Mythos looks to China
9:16 Does Mythos mark a new phase in the US-China arms race?
20:21 Can Anthropic contain Mythos?
25:52 Could superhacker AIs bring cooperation?
37:17 How scary is China, really?
45:21 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Lennart Heim (Stealth). Recorded April 29, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Overtime titles:

What good is the US “tech stack”?
The export control debate(s).
Imagining Chinese hegemony.
What's the chip control endgame?
Monitoring compute.
Is key infrastructure dangerously internet-dependent?
Is the AI industry acting responsibly?
Monitoring international AI development.

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0:00 Rebecca’s past work on mind and matter(ing)
3:24 Rebecca’s new book, The Mattering Instinct
8:00 Varieties of mattering experience
14:44 Mattering type 1: Heroic Strivers
18:05 Mattering type 2: Socializers
25:56 Mattering type 3: Transcenders
30:13 Mattering type 4: Competitors
39:44 “The” meaning of life problem
42:55 Does what drives us divide us?
49:00 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (The Mind-Body Problem, Plato at the Googleplex, Betraying Spinoza, The Mattering Instinct). Recorded April 27, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Overtime titles:

0:00 How do Steven Pinker and Bob matter?
4:20 Good vs bad mattering (and thermodynamics)
13:55 Finding meaning in absurdity
21:36 Is there a best way to matter?
28:34 The AI threat(s) to human flourishing
34:53 Why consciousness matters—even if there’s only matter

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As the fifth anniversary of my seminal contribution to blobology approaches, there will naturally be widespread clamoring for me to take stock—to deliver a report on the state of the Blob (defined, loosely speaking, as the foreign policy establishment). As I prepare this anniversary opus, I thought I’d give NZN readers a preview—a report on the state of my state of the Blob report.

I’m afraid the news isn’t good.

I’m not referring to the obviously bad news: that one of the key takeaways from Blob studies—about the manifest idiocy of launching regime change wars, especially when the regime poses no imminent threat to any nation and no long-term threat to America—somehow failed to penetrate the brain of the current occupant of the White House, even though as a candidate he explicitly assured us that it had.

No, I bring even worse news than that. Namely: As the age of artificial intelligence dawns, the various people who make a living as Blobsters—the think tankers, the past and present government officials, the military-industrial-complex titans, the influential media figures—show few signs of getting the picture. Whereas the atomic age spawned lots of creative and even enlightened thinking about its revolutionary implications for national and international security, the age of AI seems so far to be having roughly the opposite effect.

In recent days, two paradigmatic examples of this problem have come to my attention. One involves the China Talk podcast, which for better or worse (plot spoiler: worse) has attained some prominence within the Blob, and indeed recently featured two important former government officials sharing their thoughts on artificial intelligence. The other example involves Palantir, the Silicon Valley defense contractor known for managing the AI-infused software that processed the list of opening-day targets for the Iran war—a list that seems to have included an elementary school whose student body is now largely dead.

I always encourage people who don’t know much about Palantir and are curious about it to start with this short video of Palantir CEO Alex Karp speaking at a public event a bit more than a year ago:

Why, when I was a boy, the men who ran the big defense contractors were mild mannered and evinced a sense of decorum—maybe because they perceived that coming off as belligerent and semi-deranged would be bad for their brand. I’d like to think that they understood something Karp doesn’t, but I fear that, actually, we’re now living in an age when coming off as belligerent and semi-deranged can be good for your brand.

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I have additional thoughts about Palantir, but they’ll be easier to process if I first spend a little time on China Talk. This podcast’s more dovish detractors sometimes call it China Hawk, and indeed, its host, Jordan Schneider, fits that description. I interviewed Schneider on the NonZero podcast some months ago and tried to challenge his China hawkism. Judging by his recent discussions of AI, my intervention was less than transformative.

Consider, for example, his take on the implications of Mythos, the new but as yet unreleased Anthropic large language model that, as I’ve noted before, has an unprecedented ability to find and exploit software vulnerabilities. Some people think Mythos foreshadows future AI threats to international stability that are best addressed through international cooperation. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently suggested as much, a suggestion that triggered this response from Schneider on his podcast:

[Jensen] said, “Look, this is something that the US and China need to solve with dialogue.” I am sorry—No one is going to solve the fact that states want to hack other states and other state systems and read their secrets, and, like, maybe make things blow up, through dialogue. I mean this is not something like a global pandemic where it sort of threatens everyone.

Actually, this is like a global pandemic. Powerful and autonomous AI hackers, if not kept under control, could be very bad for the US and China—and lots of other nations. For example: (1) These AIs could fall into the hands of a non-state actor, and the damage done by self-replicating autonomous hackers could cross borders, maybe resulting in the destruction of big chunks of the planet’s communications or energy or financial infrastructures; (2) One of the two AI superpowers, mindful of the growing cyberpower of the other, could misread some cyber-snafu as the opening wave of a cyberattack and then counterattack in fearful desperation, starting a conflict that was catastrophic for both.

In both scenarios—and others I could dream up—the key thing is that a lose-lose outcome is possible, so the game is non-zero-sum. In other words: It’s like a pandemic—and like various other phenomena that should in theory lead nations to cooperate out of self-interest.

This isn’t rocket science! It’s game theory 101—and back when the foundations of nuclear strategy were being laid, awareness of these game theoretical dynamics pervaded the discourse. Maybe that explains why the calls for US-China cooperation on the issues raised by Mythos have come mainly from old timers—like New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and the venerable Economist magazine and, well, me.

The rising generation of Blobsters, in contrast, seems curiously uninterested in even discussing, much less pursuing, such possibilities. A good illustration is a different recent episode of China Talk, featuring two Blobsters of some stature: Ben Buchanan, special advisor for AI in the Biden administration, and Michael Sulmeyer, assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy in the same administration. Though the entire conversation was about the implications of Mythos, neither mentioned the possibility of any kind of international agreement on AI cyberweapons—no treaty, no protocol, no memorandum of understanding, no nothing.

There was brief discussion of international “norms” that might constrain certain uses of AI. Buchanan suggested that, once AI gets better at helping people make bioweapons, then “maybe the norms save us at that point” but “I kind of doubt it, to be honest.” Sulmeyer sounded equally fatalistic. “Have we already missed that moment in AI? I’m not saying that a normative regime, you know, that we should be spending a ton of effort on that or not, just that if you’re asking about norms, that would be, I guess, my question: Is it already a little too late?”

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But there’s another path that Buchanan and Sulmeyer are sure it’s not too late to pursue. “Near and dear to my heart is building an American lead in AI,” said Buchanan—and the conversation about Mythos had “reaffirmed the importance of doing that.” Sulmeyer echoed the importance of “the leaders of America’s warfighters” understanding how important it is that “our offensive cyberoperators maintain and extend a competitive advantage.”

Meanwhile, Chris McGuire, their colleague in the Biden administration and now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in the Financial Times: “The consequences of losing the AI arms race are no longer theoretical. AI models are now the decisive offensive and defensive tools in cyber space, and American and allied cyber security depends on maximizing the US lead over China in AI.” McGuire advocated tightening already tough restrictions on the export of chips and chipmaking equipment to China.

So what could the success of McGuire’s plan look like? Here’s a possibility you won’t hear from him: If America’s estimated seven-month lead in the AI race persists or even grows, and AI approaches levels of power that could confer utter dominance on the nation in the lead, the incentive of China to stage a pre-emptive strike would grow (as noted in a much discussed paper called “Superintelligence Strategy,” co-authored by Dan Hendryks, with whom I discussed it on the NonZero podcast). For example, China might attack Taiwan, the location of the factories that produce all those advanced AI chips that, thanks to US export controls, flow to the West but not to China.

It strikes some people as almost unbearably ironic to say that America’s national security could be served by restraint in the development of powerful weapons. But life is full of irony! And there was a time when influential people in the national security establishment understood that. More than half a century ago, some of them realized that, though “missile defense” sounds like a security blanket, it could be the opposite: If nuclear powers started developing missile defenses on a large scale, that could increase the chances of nuclear war by undermining the logic of mutually assured destruction. So Richard Nixon—no hippie peacenik—signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; he chose to keep America’s nuclear missiles vulnerable because, so long as the Soviet Union verifiably reciprocated, that would keep both nations safer.

I grant that maintaining global stability in the age of AI is much more challenging than it was in Nixon’s day. To take just one example: A key to nuclear deterrence is that you’d know where incoming missiles were fired from, so the attacker could expect retaliation—and, as many analysts have noted, cyberattacks, in contrast, don’t generally have a clear return address. So, in the age heralded by Mythos, you can’t count on deterrence to keep the peace.

But don’t bother Alex Karp with details like that. Palantir this week posted a long tweet that was a bullet point summary of the bestselling book The Technological Republic, which Karp co-authored. Bullet Point number 12: “One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on AI is set to begin.”

It will definitely be a new era—we agree on that.

Feel free to pre-order my book on AI, which comes out in June:

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis. “The Blob” lede art by Nikita Petrov.

Here’s the link for that April 25, noon ET Zoom call with paid subscribers:

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This episode includes an Overtime segment that’s available to paid subscribers. If you’re not a paid subscriber, we of course encourage you to become one. If you are a paid subscriber, you can access the complete conversation either via the audio and video on this post or by setting up the paid-subscriber podcast feed, which includes all exclusive audio content. To set that up, simply grab the RSS feed from this page (by first clicking the “...” icon on the audio player) and paste it into your favorite podcast app. If you have trouble completing the process, check out this super-simple how-to guide.

0:00 Teaser
0:49 Paul’s new baby is reportedly cute
6:54 The Tucker-Trump fracture
12:16 Parenting later in life
19:36 Paul’s TED talk on AI and loneliness
25:25 When does embryo screening become eugenics?
34:13 Is intelligence a positional good?
43:00 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Paul Bloom (https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net, University of Toronto, The Sweet Spot, Against Empathy). Recorded April 22, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Paul’s newsletter:

Small Potatoes

Psychology, philosophy, jokes, and more

By Paul Bloom

Overtime titles:

Modern fatherhood.
How Bob bonded with Al Gore.
Tony Robbins and Easter Island.
Betting on our AI future.
Theories of parenting.
Why are siblings so different?

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0:00 Rob’s role in the Obama nuclear deal
1:43 A deal that could work for both Trump and Iran
12:10 Iran’s security “guarantee” problem
19:38 Bob: If I were Iran, I would say…
24:36 What Obama’s negotiators had that Trump’s don’t
29:26 How unified is the Iranian side?
37:44 Is Iran’s Hormuz leverage running dry?
41:04 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Robert Malley (Yale - Jackson School of Global Affairs, Tomorrow is Yesterday). Recorded April 21, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Overtime titles:

Trump’s three ways to end the war.
The pros and cons of Trump’s psychology.
Bibi’s true war aims.
Can the new “Quartet” play peacemaker?
America’s counter-blockade as cognitive empathy lesson.
What “poisoned chalices” can—and can’t—Iran accept?

Overtime video:

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Save the date: I'll be hosting a Zoom discussion for NonZero members next Saturday, April 25th, at noon US Eastern Time. The main topic will be AI, though some discussion of the Iran war (or, God willing, the war’s end) will probably be in order. A link to the Zoom call is at the bottom of this newsletter.
—Bob

The knives are out for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, both figuratively and pretty close to literally. Last week—a few days after publication of a New Yorker piece featuring tons of anonymous attestations to Altman’s duplicitousness, and a few days before a Wall Street Journal piece about his conflicts of financial interest—an anti-AI extremist threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s house.

Altman suggested a causal link between the two kinds of attacks. In a blog post about the attempted firebombing, he called the New Yorker article “incendiary” and noted that it came in a time of “great anxiety about AI.” Maybe, he mused, the attack on his home was testament to “the power of words and narratives”.

A debate about the relationship between strong words and radical action was already happening in AI circles, owing to an armed attack a week earlier on the home of an Indianapolis politician who supported the construction of a local data center. The Altman attack turned the volume up a notch.

Nirit Weiss-Blatt, who writes an anti-AI-alarmism newsletter, assessed some Discord posts written by the accused firebomber and concluded that he had undergone “a long radicalization process shaped by ‘AI existential risk’ rhetoric.” OpenAI’s global policy chief, Chris Lehane, connected the Altman attack to the “very, very negative and dark view of humanity” held by “the Doomers.” Lehane said, “When you put some of those thoughts and ideas out there, they do have consequences.” Putting a finer point on it, White House AI adviser (and wealthy veteran of Silicon Valley) Sriram Krishnan highlighted the title of a book co-authored by Nate Soares and Doomer-in-chief Eliezer Yudkowsky. “This is the logical outcome of ‘If we build it everyone dies,’” Krishnan tweeted.

Here’s my radical take: If there’s a sense in which finger pointing is in order, some fingers should be pointed toward Silicon Valley—pointed at the culture of self-serving tech libertarianism that people like Krishnan represent. As exhibit A, I direct your attention to last week’s edition of the very influential podcast All In, whose cast of tech bro regulars includes White House AI Czar David Sacks and which is to Silicon Valley roughly what Pravda was to the Soviet Union (and which, for that matter, is to the Trump administration roughly what Pravda was to the Soviet Union).

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But first a note about the senses in which finger pointing is and isn’t in order:

Obviously, none of us—not the New Yorker, not Krishnan, not Sacks, not Yudkowsky, and, above all, not me—is morally responsible for the actions of people who are inspired or provoked by our words to do things we don’t espouse and didn’t mean to encourage. And if we’re held legally responsible for such things, that’s a threat to the foundations of liberal democracy.

That said, it is legitimate, and can be healthy, to argue that certain kinds of speech, though constitutionally protected, and perhaps morally defensible as well, do make certain kinds of reprehensible behavior more likely. Among other virtues, getting clearer on the causal connections between speech and bad behavior can help conscientious people refine their messaging to reduce its cost/benefit ratio. This clarity can also inform people’s judgments about which kinds of speech, though constitutionally protected, nonetheless deserve moral condemnation.

Now back to All In. Last week’s episode began with a discussion of Anthropic’s new but unreleased large language model Mythos, which I wrote about in last week’s Earthling. Mythos, apparently, has demonstrated an uncanny ability to find, and in many cases exploit, vulnerabilities in software; it has found holes in all major operating systems and browsers, among other platforms. So Anthropic is sharing Mythos with companies that maintain big parts of the digital infrastructure, like Microsoft and Apple and Cisco and Google, so they can find holes and patch them.

The All In discussion of Mythos began with guest Brad Gerstner, a Silicon Valley investor, who applauded Anthropic’s actions and used them as an object lesson in how little regulation AI needs. “What I like about this is they didn’t need government to hold their hand on this,” he said of the team at Anthropic. “We have plenty of government regulations.”

Now let’s think about this.

If what Anthropic says about Mythos is true, then we may have just dodged a very big bullet. This is an AI that, in the wrong hands, could do God knows what—take down power grids, vacuum up the life savings of retirees, induce a panic or a stock market crash by hijacking social media accounts en masse. And Gerstner seems to agree that the stakes are this high. If Mythos had been released, he said, it “would wreak havoc”—it would have “broken a lot of core things on the internet” and “allow offensive hacking.” Yet he’s happy to leave the decision about releasing such tools in the hands of whoever happens to be running whichever AI company happens to develop the next comparably dangerous tool—and the one after that and the one after that and…

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And it’s not like envisioning an occasionally reckless CEO of less than sterling character takes a wild leap of imagination. That New Yorker piece quoted one acquaintance of Sam Altman calling him a “sociopath” and a former member of OpenAI’s board describing him as having an “almost a sociopathic lack of concern” for the consequences of his deceptions.

The source of Gerstner’s faith in the judgment and character of all present and future AI CEOs is a little unclear. At one point he seems to suggest that self-interest will lead them to do the right thing. What Anthropic did was in “the best long-term interest of the company,” he says. Yet he prefaces his remarks by saying Anthropic deserves “a ton of credit here” and ends them by saying that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his team “deserve a lot of credit”—even though credit isn’t something we normally award for pursuing self-interest.

Maybe Gerstner’s point was that pursuing your long-term self-interest can be hard when you’re in a fiercely competitive AI race, and releasing a world-beatingly powerful model could generate a lot of revenue and steal the thunder of your most bitter rival. If so, I agree. Which is exactly why I say we shouldn’t leave these things entirely in the hands of AI companies. Indeed, given the rumors that OpenAI will soon announce a Mythos-level model, I don’t feel wholly confident that either Amodei or Altman will in the coming months exercise as much self restraint as society deserves.

By the way, the investment company Gerstner runs, Altimeter Capital, has stakes in Anthropic and OpenAI worth billions of dollars. So it’s possible that his views on government regulation of the AI industry aren’t entirely free of bias.

All In host Jason Calakanis did disclose Gerstner’s stake in these companies, so it’s not like this was a covert influence op. But in a way that’s my point: I think one thing that drives some doomers crazy—figuratively and perhaps in the case of Altman’s assailant literally—is the perception that serious discussion about regulating AI is being thwarted by rich and powerful people who are serving their own interests at the expense of the public interest. These Silicon Valley potentates wield great influence via various levers of power, and they do so conspicuously and unabashedly.

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For example, Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, has donated $50 million to Leading the Future, a Super PAC that’s devoted to squashing various regulatory initiatives and kneecapping congressional candidates who support them. I assume he’s happy with his work so far; as of now there is zero meaningful federal regulation of AI. And, lest any states fill the void, Leading the Future backed a law that would have banned all AI regulation at the state level for 10 years.

I’m not saying Brockman bears any moral responsibility for the firebombing of Sam Altman’s house—any more than Eliezer Yudkowsky does. But if you’re speculating about the causal forces that came together in the firebomber’s presumably unbalanced mind to catalyze his crime, I don’t see any reason to give more weight to Yudkowsky’s arguments than to the perception that powerful people like Brockman are making it hard for such arguments to get a fair hearing via conventional political channels.

On this week’s episode of the New York Times tech podcast Hard Fork, co-host Casey Newton, in the course of discussing the attack on Altman’s house, said the following:

This AI moment that we’re living through is a top-down moment. It did not rise up from the grass roots from a bunch of nerds getting together in their garages and training frontier models. It was a small group of really smart people who were able to get access to massive amounts of capital from the elites in our society, and they’re now mounting this effort to build it very quickly, deploy it very quickly without a lot of guard rails. I think when the average person looks at this, they think, not only did I not ask for this but I have no meaningful control over it. And I think that’s a big reason you’re seeing people so furious—because I think, particularly on the left, this just looks like mostly a right wing elite project that’s being championed by President Trump and the many venture capitalists that are in his administration, and if you’re already worried it’s going to take your job, and you think you don’t have any control over it, well of course you’re going to hate it.

That sounds about right to me. People worried about the impact of AI look around and see no serious consideration of the possibility that this technology is moving too fast—at least, no consideration that has had any impact at the policy level. And what they do see—on the All In podcast and elsewhere—is rich, powerful people who make facile and obviously self-serving arguments yet carry the day. And often these arguments are aired in forums that, like the All In podcast and God knows how many pricey tech conferences, have the trappings of debate but lack the diversity of viewpoint that would make the debate meaningful.

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A question that may have more relevance to all this than meets the eye: Why did we see, in the course of a couple of weeks, both the New Yorker’s massively documented piece about Sam Altman’s deceptive tendencies and the Wall Street Journal’s piece about his conflicts of financial interest? After all, the outlines of both stories have long been evident. Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI, for example, convincingly depicted Altman as a slippery character whose word isn’t exactly his bond.

Maybe part of the answer is that, as OpenAI has over the past half-year lost ground to Anthropic, and has seemed less and less sure footed, discontent with Altman’s performance as CEO has grown. And the less confident OpenAI investors and workers feel about the future value of their equity in the company, the more open they are to change in the CEO suite—so the more willing they are to share with journalists criticisms of the current CEO that they’d previously kept under wraps. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal piece reports that there is more and more talk, among OpenAI stakeholders, about replacing Altman.

This is just speculation on my part, and it could well be wrong. But, even so, the timing of this sudden proliferation of doubts about Altman’s character is consistent with a view held by some critics of the tech industry: that Silicon Valley is fine with CEOs who lack integrity so long as they’re good at making money. This is one of many unflattering perceptions that it may not be in Silicon Valley’s long-term interest to foster.

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

And, finally: Here’s the link for that April 25, noon ET Zoom call with paid subscribers:

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This episode includes an Overtime segment that’s available to paid subscribers. If you’re not a paid subscriber, we of course encourage you to become one. If you are a paid subscriber, you can access the complete conversation either via the audio and video on this post or by setting up the paid-subscriber podcast feed, which includes all exclusive audio content. To set that up, simply grab the RSS feed from this page (by first clicking the “...” icon on the audio player) and paste it into your favorite podcast app.

If you have trouble completing the process, check out this super-simple how-to guide.

0:00 Teaser
1:02 Trump’s Middle East chaos continues
6:04 Is Iran more about America’s hegemony or Israel’s?
13:22 Who will win the Hormuz blockade duel?
23:11 Ukraine, China, and the drone wars
27:58 America’s “emergency” emergency
32:11 Is an Iran peace deal possible?
43:34 Overtime preview: The Anthropic Mythos scare

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True), Derek Davison (Foreign Exchanges, American Prestige, Discontents), and Daniel Bessner (American Prestige, University of Washington). Recorded April 16, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

American Prestige on SupportingCast: https://americanprestige.supportingcast.fm/listen

Overtime titles:
Anthropic’s new AI: mythos vs reality.
RIP the intellectual?
Is Bob feeling la revolución?
Danny’s devastating antisemitism riposte.
JD Vance, the Pope, and Clavicular.
On Christian-Islamic theological relations.

Overtime video:

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0:00 Teaser
3:15 Trump’s Iran blockade breaks the ceasefire
6:44 A Chinese tanker calls Trump’s bluff
11:30 Bob’s case for an Iranian “tollgate”
16:47 Anthropic’s Mythos model is too dangerous to release
24:07 Nikita’s big idea: AI as world peace mediator
40:19 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Nikita Petrov (https://psychopolitica.substack.com). Recorded April 14, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Nikita’s newsletter:

Psychopolitica

Russian psychedelia in exile 🍄

By Nikita Petrov

Overtime titles:
Did Anthropic accidentally teach its AI to deceive?
The Israeli-cuisine study: how subtle training bias creeps in.
Does the Russian language carry a curse?
Bob on Hitler's biography.
AI Hitler is a YouTube influencer.
Orban's defeat and whether Vance's endorsement backfired.

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Save the date: I'll be hosting a Zoom discussion for NonZero members on Saturday, April 25th, at noon US Eastern Time. The subject will be AI and, to some extent, war—and the particular connection between the two that’s laid out in the piece below. A link to the Zoom call is at the bottom of this newsletter.
—Bob

“The week that changed everything” is a phrase that shouldn’t be tossed around lightly. After all, “everything” covers a lot!

Also: In what may be the phrase’s most common context—a Christian context—it refers to the week that brought the Crucifixion and Resurrection of the Messiah and hence the promise of salvation for humankind. And that’s a high bar.

So I’m going to hold off for now on calling this past week the week that changed everything. But I’m going to argue that, depending on how things play out, a title this exalted could wind up being in order. This was a week that saw seismic tremors at two different levels—one geopolitical (in the Middle East) and one technological (in artificial intelligence). And there was a connection between the two that isn’t yet visible but could prove momentous. The connection could even prove salvific—salvific as in salvation, as in the salvation of humankind. And I’m not kidding, so long as “salvation” refers not to an afterlife or the cleansing of our sins but to saving humankind from various apocalyptic outcomes, up to and including extinction.

It’s possible that I’m reading too much into this. I have a book coming out in June called The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning. And when you have a book coming out you tend to see the world through that lens, and this can lead to distortion. You can, for example, see corroboration of your book’s thesis everywhere you look. And such corroboration is what I see when I look at this week’s news. That’s not necessarily a cheering thought, because my book’s thesis isn’t wholly upbeat. Still, I do see, in this week’s news, some cause for hope—reason to think that maybe the dark scenarios laid out in my book won’t come to pass and the brighter scenarios laid out in it will.

But, again, I could be wrong; AIs aren’t the only beings capable of hallucination. You be the judge.

One of the book’s central points is that if we’re going to successfully navigate the AI revolution—avoid traumas and catastrophes that range from social chaos to planet-wide authoritarian rule to nuclear war to complete annihilation—we’ll have to cross the threshold to true global community. The world’s nations have to confront this challenge collectively—build new international rules and norms—or else watch in dismay and intermittent terror as a technology that accelerates without constraint or guidance strips us of agency. (If this sounds too dramatic, please suspend judgment. I devote a fair amount of the book to laying out the evidence and logic behind my more dramatic-sounding claims.)

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Much of what we need to do in controlling AI comes under the rubric “international governance,” but I think this phrase, radical though it sounds to some people, runs the risk of understating the challenge. After all, we have international governance now. Various treaties, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Law of the Sea Treaty, qualify for that label. And—don’t get me wrong!—these treaties are nothing to sneeze at. But few of them are global, and they often lack enforcement mechanisms, and compliance can be spotty, and they have a tendency to fray. I think AI will ultimately call for structures of international governance more ambitious and nuanced than the kind we’ve had. And, as if that weren’t a tall enough order, these structures will have to be bolstered by new norms, and these norms will have to get the kind of respect that a society’s most important norms get.

This is why I used the phrase “true global community” above. I don’t think our species will be able to muster the focus and commitment this mission demands unless we can sustain at least the minimal degree of harmony that the term “community” implies. That doesn’t mean kumbaya-level harmony, but it does mean we can’t keep getting bogged down in the kinds of wars that have plagued humanity since (at least) the dawn of history.

This points to one reason I found this week’s Iran War ceasefire, partial and tenuous though it is, heartening. I’m hoping it can usher in not just peace, but a peace that has a particular kind of psychological impact—a peace that highlights the frequent futility and absurdity of war. After all: The two aggressors, the US and Israel, spent God knows how much money and killed God knows how many innocent people, and not only failed to reach their stated war aims but may have handed their enemy a new and potent form of regional influence: ongoing control of the Strait of Hormuz. (I elaborate on some of this in a video op-ed I posted Friday about my hopes for the ceasefire—and argue that this new Iranian influence, though anathema to Israel and America, could be a stabilizing and pacifying force in the near term.)

What’s more, this war has been nothing short of a political debacle for the leader of the more powerful of the two aggressor nations, Donald Trump. So the perpetrator of an egregious violation of the UN Charter got powerfully negative feedback. That’s the kind of feedback we need if we’re going to restore some respect for international rules and norms, a pre-requisite for building a true global community.

As if Trump’s humiliation weren’t enough cause for celebration, the transparency of his motivations helped highlight the absurdity of the political dynamics that so often lead to war: National leaders inflate threats abroad to foment fear at home and thus benefit politically by posing as guardians of national security. Both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are veteran practitioners of this craft, but in this case Trump practiced it so ineptly as to invite widespread ridicule. He literally couldn’t think of a single quasi-plausible threat that Iran posed to the US, even though he deemed the Iranian menace so grave as to warrant an assault that killed thousands of people, wiped out untold infrastructure, and destroyed numerous cultural treasures.

Trump’s crudeness—the playground taunts and macho chest-pounding—can get tiresome, but it does have the virtue of clearly demonstrating what drives him and many other warmongering politicians: They’re just alpha males trying to stay on top of the heap. It would be hard for him to more vividly convey the primitive and visceral energies that fuel wars without actually putting on an ape costume.

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I don’t want to get carried away. We are not on the verge of ending war forever, and in fact it’s not even clear that we’ll succeed in ending this war. Still, this war had some of the hallmarks of a landmark. In The God Test I write, “Seeing the absurdity of the average conflict doesn’t make any particular conflict easy to resolve, and it doesn’t mean there’s never one side in a conflict that deserves support. Still, if the amount of change we need on this planet is as great as I think it is, it may be necessary for large numbers of people to look around and say, ‘Folks, this is ridiculous. We can’t go on like this.’ ” What we’ve seen over the past six weeks is a war that, more than any American war I’ve lived through, invites that kind of reaction. Folks, this was ridiculous. It was almost a caricature of the folly of war, and I hope it will be seen that way more and more as it recedes into the past.

So that’s the seismic activity at the geopolitical level that I alluded to above—a war that seized the world’s attention by imperiling the global economy and that, however unwelcome in itself, could have a welcome impact on the perception of war itself, an impact that I hope is the beginning of truly tectonic change, of a sustained drift away from war.

Of course, a hope is just a hope. One conspicuously absurd war won’t by itself transform the world’s view of war, much less build a global community. That construction project will require additional impetus. Which leads us to the other level at which seismic change was evident this week: the technological level, where that very impetus began to materialize.

This week Anthropic announced that it has a new large language model that’s way more powerful than past models—so powerful that it poses a threat to the world’s information infrastructure. This model can find otherwise unfindable vulnerabilities in software—and in fact, said Anthropic, has found previously unknown holes in every major operating system and browser. And in most cases, it is able to then build a tool to exploit those vulnerabilities. So if this model fell into the wrong hands, that could be big trouble—which is why, says Anthropic, there are no plans to release the model for the time being.

Some people have wondered whether Anthropic’s claims about the terrifying power of this new model are mainly marketing hype—a suspicion that isn’t exactly discouraged by the model’s name: Mythos. But Anthropic is making Mythos available to big companies that maintain important parts of the digital infrastructure, like Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco. So if these claims were hugely exaggerated, word of that would get out—especially since one of the companies, Google, is a direct competitor of Anthropic’s and would presumably prefer not to admit that Mythos is significantly more powerful than its own frontier model, Gemini, in such an important domain. (Mythos, says Anthropic, wasn’t designed to facilitate cyberattacks—this capability was just a byproduct of designing it to write computer code and handle intellectual challenges more generally.)

AI, as Mythos demonstrates, is a good example of a technology that can’t be adequately governed at the national level alone. Today it’s America that has the most potent AI hacker, but tomorrow it could be China. In fact, we can’t be quite sure that China doesn’t have a potent AI hacker now, because the two countries are making no serious effort to collaboratively address the emerging challenge they face and so aren’t doing a lot of communicating on this subject.

That gives me an uneasy feeling. As I write in The God Test:

These kinds of dangers—AI-abetted biological virus, AI-abetted computer virus, AI-infused cyberweapon, rampantly destructive AI agent—and various others make it harder for any nation to feel safe unless it has some confidence that things are under control in other nations. And it’s hard to get that kind of confidence without international agreements that qualify, in at least some sense, for the term “international governance.”

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I’m happy to report that the need for international coordination on AI is appreciated by some influential people. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, assessing the Anthropic news, wrote this week:

The solution—this may shock people—must begin with the two AI superpowers, the US and China. It is now urgent that they learn to collaborate to prevent bad actors from gaining access to this next level of cyber capability. Such a powerful tool would threaten them both, leaving them exposed to criminal actors inside their countries and terrorist groups and other adversaries outside. It could easily become a greater threat to each country than the two countries are to each other.

But other observers have reacted in roughly the opposite fashion, saying there’s no realistic hope of deep trans-Pacific cooperation, so America must double down on its AI race with China. This will no doubt be a common reaction.

Another common reaction, I suspect, will be that we should immediately set about deploying Mythos as a weapon against China. This week the well known social media influencer Noah Smith, in reference to a story about recent data theft from a state-run Chinese computer, tweeted: “Just today, someone asked me: If our government knew about Mythos ahead of time, why didn’t it team up with Anthropic to hack China before announcing the model’s capabilities to the public?”

If our government hasn’t done that, the reason may be the Trump administration’s ongoing spat with Anthropic. But you can bet that people in the administration are pondering the question Smith raised. And you can bet that people in Beijing are pondering it. And you can pretty much bet that nobody in the Trump administration is wise enough to ponder the implications of Beijing pondering it. Here’s one such implication: When nations get insecure about the emerging capabilities of another nation, they sometimes take dramatic action. Just ask Bibi Netanyahu. And when the emerging capability is ultra-powerful hacking that, for all you know, is already being deployed against you, a nation can get insecure and reactive, and interpret ambiguous evidence as attack and respond accordingly.

The principle this points to—the potentially stabilizing effects of mutual transparency between the US and China—is just one of many AI-related issues that deserve lots of attention and aren’t getting much. The same might be said of this week’s Anthropic news itself. (The Times, notwithstanding Friedman’s column, ran its news story about Mythos in the business section—and, in the physical edition, below the fold.) But this story is still filtering through tech podcasts and other niche media and is destined to get more mainstream attention for some time to come.

I’m hoping that, as more and more people process the story, they’ll see its significance. I’m also hoping that they’ll understand one reason its significance took a while to sink in: Because news about it was obscured by news of war. To put a finer point on it: Tuesday—the day Anthropic released the news—was also the day Trump declared that if Iran didn’t bend to his will, “a whole civilization will die tonight.”

It’s understandable that this bizarre and vile and ultimately ephemeral threat to a great civilization absorbed our attention while news of a more deeply rooted and enduring threat to civilization writ large flew under the radar. Still, folks, this is ridiculous—that we’re letting primitive and malicious creatures like Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu dominate the stage while issues of critical importance to the whole planet languish in relative obscurity.

Maybe reflecting on the absurdity of Tuesday’s allocation of attention will help us eventually get our priorities straight. So remember the date: April 7, 2026. We can call it Planet of the Apes day.

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PS: I taped a podcast conversation this week with Shakeel Hakim, editor of Transformer, a newsletter about AI. We taped the conversation Tuesday, right before the Mythos news broke (or at least before it reached my news feed). But we did agree on some things relevant to Mythos: (1) AI demands international governance; (2) It may take a catastrophe to focus the world’s attention on that fact—but, as Shakeel pointed out, we can hope that this service will instead be performed by a “near miss,” a narrowly averted catastrophe. Well, so far, at least, Mythos hasn’t brought a catastrophe and so is the closest thing we’ve had to a “near miss.” Let’s not waste it.

PPS: I notice that the Amazon page for my book offers a “pre-order price guarantee”—an opportunity to lock in the current price just in case the price changes between now and June. Now, TBH, the chances of the price rising over the next two months are, to judge by past publishing experience, roughly zero. OTOH, the price of oil hasn’t returned to its pre-war level, and I’ve never seen an Amazon delivery truck that had solar panels, so you never know…

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Note: Those final data points are from before the Iran War.

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

And, finally: Here’s the link for that April 25, noon ET Zoom call with paid subscribers:

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If you have trouble completing the process, check out this super-simple how-to guide.

0:00 A brief message from Bob
3:25 Shakeel’s newsletter, Transformer, and its mission
7:16 The case(s) against Sam Altman
12:58 OpenAI President Greg Brockman’s political spending
17:15 The founding doctrines of the leading AI labs
22:46 The singleton and the singularity
27:34 How market forces overwhelm good intentions
32:35 Is the singularity near?
41:30 Sam vs. Dario vs. Demis
46:14 Heading into Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True), Shakeel Hashim (Transformer). Recorded April 7, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Shakeel's newsletter:

Transformer

Covering the power and politics of transformative AI.

Overtime titles:
What is going on in Elon Musk’s head?
Is Meta still in the AI race? Is Google?
More on Elon’s head.
How seriously does Mark Zuckerberg take AI?
Shakeel: If our fate depends on any one of these guys, we’re in trouble.

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If you have trouble completing the process, check out this super-simple how-to guide.

0:00 Bob and Eli’s history of (civil) disagreement on Iran
1:38 Is Trump’s war on Iran legal? Does it matter?
7:47 Who’s the real rogue state?
19:02 Israel’s nukes and Iran’s nuclear program
29:41 Is Israel more moral than Iran?
38:21 How Hamas became Hamas
45:40 “Proxy,” “theocracy,” and other fighting words
54:20 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True), Eli Lake (The Free Press, Breaking History, The Re-Education). Recorded April 6, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Eli for The Free Press: https://www.thefp.com/w/eli-lake

Overtime titles:

0:00 Is Iran a rational actor?
11:06 Differing views on the 1953 CIA coup
33:41 Cognitive bias and the Middle East conflict
42:00 The West Bank question(s)
44:50 Does Iran really want to destroy Israel?
53:24 What does Israel want for the region?

Overtime video:

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Welcome to another issue of NZNet Digest, a collection of highlights from NonZero Network member newsletters and other worthwhile media outlets. Paid subscribers to the NonZero Newsletter can get a 50 percent discount on an annual subscription to any NZNet member newsletter.

SINICA

After two weeks on the ground in China, investment strategist Andy Rothman reports that Beijing sees the Iran War’s energy shock as validation of its green-tech bet. The expectation is that higher oil prices will boost foreign demand for Chinese batteries, EVs, and such renewables as solar panels, somewhat as the 1970s energy crises boosted the demand for fuel-efficient Japanese cars. But, now that the US has performed this service for China by attacking Iran, it’s not clear to Beijing that President Trump has much more to offer. Rothman frames Trump’s scheduled visit to China in mid-May this way:

Beijing will give Trump the pomp and circumstance he craves but does not trust him enough to engage in serious negotiations, I was told. The Chinese will be happy to agree to do things that are in their interest, such as buying more soybeans and signing non-binding MOUs [memorandums of understanding] to purchase Boeing aircraft, but they won’t make any real concessions to a leader they don’t trust. Note that the two sides still haven’t published a written statement of what Trump and Xi agreed to when they met last fall in Korea, and Beijing hasn’t even verbally acknowledged its side of that deal. China’s objective is simply to maintain stability in the bilateral relationship…

EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS

Operation Epic Fury (aka Attacking Iran) is “already among the most consequential unauthorized presidential uses of force in all of American history—probably the second most consequential, after the Korean War.” That’s the assessment of Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, legal scholars who served in the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, respectively. In their newsletter Executive Functions, they argue that the administration’s failure to get Congressional approval for the Iran war isn’t just a constitutional problem—it’s a strategic one. The chaos of the last month, they suggest, is partly a product of the president not having to explain himself:

There is a direct connection, we think, between the absence of real consultation with Congress, before or since the conflict began, and the volatility with which the administration has conducted the war. This is not necessarily because congressional leaders have great military insight (though some may). It is because the need to justify and explain to government leaders outside the presidential bubble might have surfaced the many problems that have become apparent over the last month and counseled a steadier course. … But, and it is a meaningful “but,” Trump will soon have to ask Congress for appropriations to support this very expensive war. This is the one constitutional check that he must face. Soldiers, defense contractors, and others must be paid. Appropriations are the point at which Congress can and must hold the administration to account for its unilateral decision to go to war.

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GLOBAL DISPATCHES

The risk of nuclear war is growing, according to international security expert Wilfred Wan—not just because such treaties as New START have lapsed, or because of heightened tensions among nuclear-armed states, but because of technological advance: The growing military importance of such domains as AI, outer space, and cybertech is creating new and poorly understood pathways to nuclear escalation. Wan, speaking to Mark Leon Goldberg on the Global Dispatches podcast, noted that various new technologies, including remotely steered or autonomous drones, can render nuclear-armed militaries more vulnerable and hence raise the chances of nuclear counter-attack.

Last June, we saw a number of Ukrainian drones target and damage Russian strategic bombers because these bombers were being used to launch conventional cruise missiles into Ukraine. But by doing this, [Ukraine] also attacked Russian nuclear forces, which were undermined as a result of the attacks. And in fact, some Russian experts called for a nuclear response to those attacks because of the strategic impact that they had… A lot of these capabilities in space and cyber, they can serve conventional and nuclear missions, they can serve civilian and military missions in a manner that can contribute to confusion or unintended consequences. … Multi-domain operations contribute to greater destabilization and more frequent crises because there’s a lack of agreements on thresholds, on red lines, on what would be a proportionate response … and all of that, in turn, impacts on escalation pathways.

THE BEINART NOTEBOOK

In recent weeks the Israeli military has displaced more than a million Lebanese and seized lots of Lebanese territory, but the operation is encountering much more resistance than expected, according to Rami Khouri of the American University of Beirut. He tells Peter Beinart that, after Israeli strikes destroyed much of Hezbollah’s infrastructure and leadership in 2024 and 2025, the organization reconstituted itself to an extent that now impedes Israeli and American goals.

If you go back now, document all of the mainstream media and US political and Israeli political statements about Hezbollah [having] been “dealt a death blow, they can’t do anything anymore,” and then look at what Hezbollah is doing today, most of what the US mainstream media and political class and the Israeli media and military class [have] said about Hezbollah is not true….

Khouri says Israel’s goal is regional hegemony—to turn nearby nations into “unofficial vassal states” and to accomplish that with no constraints from international law:

Before the Israelis did the genocide against Gaza, they and the Americans conducted a political genocide against the international rule of law… The ICC [International Criminal Court], the ICJ [International Court of Justice], the UN resolutions, the Human Rights Council [have] been neutered if not wiped out. The law is what Trump and Netanyahu say it is. But what’s going on on the ground, in Iran and Lebanon, suggests that Trump and Netanyahu may not achieve what they want because the pushback has been so severe and so significant.

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THE GLENN SHOW

When the Pentagon asked for $200 billion to fund war with Iran, some Democrats pointed to such alternative uses for that money as medical care for Americans. But will that kind of messaging really resonate with voters? Glenn Show regular John McWhorter is skeptical. It’s “a little too abstract to move people into the voting booth,” he said to host Glenn Loury, who promptly disagreed:

Here’s $200 billion. Let’s see. What can we do with it? We can indemnify our citizens against the possibility that they’ll be driven into bankruptcy by health care costs, or we could drop some more bombs on Tehran. Let’s see—which one is making America great again? I mean, I don’t think that’s one that you need a degree in rocket science to be able to figure out. … Everything depends on how long this thing goes on. And oil, too. What’s going to happen with oil? … I’ve been reading stories about urea, the substance that goes into the manufacture of fertilizers, that is derived from processing natural gas, and that is in short supply, and that will affect agricultural planting cycles. … The consequence of agricultural yields going down means starvation in some places in the world. All this is very serious stuff.

SMALL POTATOES

This just in from the frontiers of psychological research: Losing sleep to a newborn feels different from losing sleep to insomnia. Paul Bloom, a month into the life of baby Zoe, reports that he’s tired and stupid—but weirdly cheerful. The veteran insomniac hypothesizes that the misery of sleeplessness has less to do with the sleep you lose than with the story you tell yourself about why you lost it:

I’ve long been an insomniac, and a bad night often leaves me angry and bitter the next day. So I expected newborn sleep deprivation to make me miserable. But it hasn’t. I’m tired—and, yes, stupid—but still pretty cheerful. I think the difference is that my usual insomnia feels like failure: I’ve ruined the next day, and it’s my own fault. But being awake because you have to keep your tiny baby alive feels purposeful, even virtuous—like your legs burning after a long run.

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SINICA

Why did China fly classicists business class to a 400-person conference in Beijing in late 2024? Some Western observers have answered defensively: China is trying to mine the West’s source code—this is nothing less than civilizational appropriation! But writer Chang Che—author of a recent New Yorker piece on the boom in interest in the classics in Chinese universities—tells Sinical Podcast host Kaiser Kuo that the reality is more complicated:

There was an interpretation that China was trying to use classics like offense. I don’t think that was the case. … If you are a Chinese scholar studying at, let’s say, Yale and you go into a cocktail party and you say, “Who is Shakespeare?” or “Who is Plato?”—you’d be laughed out of the room. That’s just unacceptable. But if you’re an American scholar at [Beijing University] and you ask who Du Fu is, that’s completely fine. That’s not a thing that you will be socially ostracized for. So there’s a cultural asymmetry in the global expectations about how we understand Chinese civilization versus Western civilization. And in this current era, China is like— ‘Why? Why should that be the case?’ … The goal is for people in the Chinese classics departments to be well-read in both Eastern and Western traditions. It’s going to be a home for Plato as much as Confucius.

THE BEINART NOTEBOOK

With Passover arriving amid multiple Israeli military campaigns—including ongoing assaults in Gaza and the West Bank—Peter Beinart spoke with Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, about whether Judaism can be disentangled from the policies of the Israeli state. Schorsch says tension between religious identity and government action is ancient, stretching back to the biblical prophets’ critiques of Israelite kings, and reads the Passover narrative itself as implying moral constraints on national power:

So, the first stricture that Israel faces is to remember its slavery, remember the cruelty and the political oppression which you suffered, for that is the polar opposite of the kingdom that I want you to create. And the second stricture on this political entity coming out of Egypt is Mount Sinai. Mount Sinai follows the Exodus. The Exodus is not an end in itself… Mount Sinai is the giving of the Torah. It is the giving of commandments. It is the imposition of principles and values that are to guide this political entity. The political entity created after the Exodus is not to be driven by greed; it is to be driven by constraints, morality, and fundamental principles. So, the nation to come out of Egypt had quite severe constraints placed upon itself in order to help it become the model political entity that might inspire the ancient world. I believe thinking of Passover in that context gives us values and inspirations that can help us celebrate Passover in the contemporary era.

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AI policy: Some of the summaries (the short introductions that precede the italicized blocks of text) in this issue of NZNet Digest are based on AI-generated drafts. In all cases the summaries were edited, and substantially altered, by a human (me), and in all cases the summary was checked for accuracy by a human who read the text that the summary characterizes.
—Bob

Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

If you have trouble completing the process, check out this super-simple how-to guide.

0:00 Would America benefit from Iran “winning”?
3:10 Trump’s last exit ramp?
12:56 What’s China’s angle on the war?
17:11 Trump: psychoanalyzed
20:22 Israel: psychoanalyzed
24:51 Iran’s plans for the Strait of Hormuz
30:27 Is this Trump’s biggest blunder?
40:25 The intra-MAGA war over Iran (and Israel)
53:24 Where are the Democrats?
59:25 Antisemitism, alleged and real
1:05:50 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True), Curt Mills (The American Conservative), Andrew Day (The American Conservative). Recorded March 31, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Overtime titles:

Israel and Jewish identity.
Bob on what Joe Kent gets wrong.
An anti-war ticket in 2028?
Intra-MAGA tensions over AI.

Overtime video:

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If you have trouble completing the process, check out this super-simple how-to guide.

0:00 Teaser
1:07 Defining (and preventing) superintelligence
6:39 Where the nuclear analogy holds (and where it breaks)
11:17 Imagining an AI inspections regime
15:35 The superintelligence precursors to watch for
19:20 Our dangerous lack of government oversight
26:38 ControlAI’s “bottom-up” approach to AI policy
30:53 The mounting geopolitical challenges to AI governance
47:57 Heading into Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Andrea Miotti (ControlAI). Recorded March 17, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Overtime titles:

Why the big AI labs are so irresponsible.
Innovation in atoms vs bits.
Successionism in Silicon Valley.
Self-reinforcing race dynamics.
Anthropic's propaganda machine.
Nihilism as our enemy.

Overtime video:

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Why is the current war happening? If you want to answer that question in a broad sense—in a way that applies not just to the Iran war but to other needless bursts of carnage of the past and future—I would direct your attention to an exchange that took place this week on a New York Times podcast called The Opinions.

The exchange was between Times columnist David French and retired four-star General Stanley McChrystal, and it was an archetypal interaction between two kinds of mindsets—the kind that keeps getting us into wars and the kind that, if it were more common, could keep us out of them.

The roles played by the two men aren’t what you might expect based on their job descriptions. It wasn’t the career Army officer who exemplified the narrowly tribalistic perspective and the writer for the liberal media who offered the more balanced and pacific view. Rather, it was the professional soldier who brought the enlightenment and the journalist who lacked it—and who showed no signs of absorbing any of it.

In a way this isn’t surprising. What McChrystal crucially evinced is the ability to see things from the point of view of other people, including adversaries and enemies—an ability any good military strategist needs. In fact, though I typically call this skill “cognitive empathy,” it is, when employed in certain contexts, also called “strategic empathy.”

As regular NonZero readers know, I consider cognitive empathy a kind of untapped superpower—a human potential that, if more widely realized, could work wonders. For example: It could transform American foreign policy from the blunt and brutal instrument it’s become into something that’s actually good for the world.

A second reason the roles played by these two men isn’t surprising is that French first got wide public exposure in 2016 when Bill Kristol proposed that he run for president. And if Bill Kristol—who as a leading neoconservative played a non-trivial role in getting the US into the Iraq War—would like to install you in the Oval Office, it’s a safe bet that you’re no slouch in the mindless tribalism department.

French was an officer in the Army Reserve, and, like McChrystal, served in the Iraq War. He begins their conversation by noting this shared history and using it to explain to listeners what he calls “the veteran’s perspective on this conflict” with Iran—a perspective he clearly is assuming McChrystal shares with him. This perspective, he says, is “different than the perspective that a lot of the folks who didn’t serve, especially in Iraq, have” and is grounded in awareness of “Iran’s role in the Iraq war, and the losses it inflicted upon us.” He recalls that, while he was in Iraq, “we lost guys to explosively formed penetrators planted by Iranian-backed militias” and then invites McChrystal to take it from there—to elaborate on “what has been the recent American experience in our long-running conflict with Iran.”

McChrystal, though, wants to take the story back in time, not forward. He says, “If we go back to the American experience, starting in 1979,” we remember that “the American embassy [in Tehran] was seized, and there were people chanting ‘death to America’.” And “that was very upsetting,” especially since, before the revolution of 1979, Iran had been America’s staunch ally. So, says McChrystal, post-revolutionary Iran seemed like “a recalcitrant enemy that hated us for some reason we couldn’t really understand.” And that attitude toward Iran was reinforced by the Iraq war experience French had just described. In Iraq, said McChrystal, “they were killing us and we were killing them,” and Iran increasingly seemed like “our lifelong enemies.”

But, he then adds, “I think that’s only part of the story.”

At this point French is either oblivious to where McChrystal wants to take the story or determined not to let him go there. Whereas McChrystal wants to talk about the roots of Iranian hostility toward America, French just wants to keep documenting the hostility. He says, “Well, if you’re going to say that’s only part of the story, we have to keep going.” He notes that, though the “surge” of US forces seemed to have smothered the Iraqi insurgency by 2009, “the story doesn’t end there, of course, General. The story keeps going, and Iranian-supported militias have been a thorn in our side, really, in Iraq ever since.”

French now invites McChrystal to sustain this theme: “Let’s pick it up after the surge. What happens next?”

McChrystal, God bless him, replies, “Well, let’s really pick it up before that, because I think it’s important… It really starts in 1953, when the US and British intelligence services overthrew the constitutionally elected prime minister” of Iran and installed the Shah, who “oppressed the people tremendously, particularly through SAVAK, the secret police. So when the Iranian revolution happens, we may be surprised [but] the Iranian people are not surprised. And when they suddenly say ‘Death to America,’ most Americans will say, ‘What’s your problem? Why are you angry at us?’ ”

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McChrystal’s narrative continues: In 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, starting an eight-year-long “brutal bloodletting” (during which the US supported Iraq with intelligence and other resources). And in 2002, McChrystal notes, George W. Bush designated Iran and Iraq as the two Middle Eastern members of the “axis of evil”—something that didn’t exactly incline Iran to roll out the welcome wagon when Bush invaded Iraq the next year and American troops were suddenly occupying Iran’s next door neighbor. Hence the Iran-backed Shia militias in Iraq that, in French’s telling, are where the story begins.

There are lots of details that McChrystal skips that would have bolstered his narrative—like the fact that, only a few months before that Bush “axis of evil” speech, in the wake of 9/11, Iran had collaborated with the US to pave the way for the American invasion of Afghanistan. (Fun fact: Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian military commander who in 2020 was assassinated by Trump via missile strike, was in 2001 on the ground in Afghanistan, using his connections in the country to help smooth the arrival of American troops. Imagine Soleimani’s surprise when he learned that, after his tour in Afghanistan, he would be reassigned to the axis of evil.) Still, McChrystal fleshes the history out enough so that his basic point is clear. As he puts it: “If we don’t understand that journey to this point, we don’t understand the attitudes that are going to drive decisions people make.”

But French, in a subtle but important sense, persists in not getting the point. He says, “I’m so glad we have dived into this from the Iranian perspective, because I think understanding the Iranian perspective really helps us maybe understand how the rest of this war might go. What kind of staying power, for example, the Iranians might have.” Elaborating, he says that “the level of commitment that exists within the regime is just something that’s theological.” Sometimes it’s even “apocalyptic,” he adds. He then relays an anecdote he heard in Iraq about how fanatical some of those Iran-backed militiamen were.

For all I know, McChrystal would agree with this emphasis on theology and apocalypticism, but it wasn’t implied by anything he’d just said, and in fact it seems closer to the opposite of his upshot. McChrystal seemed to be saying, among other things, that if you understand Iran’s history, you shouldn’t be surprised by Iranian wariness of, mistrust of, and hostility toward the US. These things don’t need some kind of special explanation grounded in Islamic theology or fundamentalist apocalypticism or Persian philosophy or anything else.

French’s depiction of the Iranian regime as intensely religious in its motivation is a time-honored trope of neoconservatives and other hard-core Iran hawks. Hence the boilerplate references—in the writing of Bret Stephens in the New York Times, Walter Russell Meade in the Wall Street Journal, David Frum in the Atlantic, and so on—to “the mullahs” who run Iran. So long as these writers can keep us thinking of Iran’s leadership as zealously religious, they’ll have an easier time convincing us that we shouldn’t let Iran do things every other country is allowed to do—like enrich uranium to a low level for (verifiably) civilian use or have an arsenal of ballistic missiles with conventional warheads.

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The threat that McChrystal’s world view poses to Iran hawks was illustrated this week on another New York Times podcast—Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times. Douthat’s guest was Mark Dubowitz, CEO of The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a deeply pro-Israel and anti-Iran think tank. After Douthat suggested that the US-Israeli strategy of “decapitation” via the serial assassination of Iranian officials naturally leads Iran to escalate, Dubowitz countered, “Well, my point is that they have been escalating against us and against Israel and against their neighbors for decades… They continue to go up the escalation curve as they’re prepared to take more and more risk against us.”

In other words: The side of the story that a broader, McChrystalite perspective includes doesn’t actually exist; since the dawn of time, Iranian “escalation” has been intrinsically driven, unaffected by exogenous variables. Dubowitz makes no mention of the time in 2024 that Israel, out of the blue, lethally bombed an Iranian consulate in Syria, or the time, in 2025, when Israel, out of the blue, staged a massive air assault on Iran, or the time a month ago when Israel and America, out of the blue, staged another such assault, this time, for good measure, killing Iran’s leader and several family members. So, needless to say, Dubowitz also fails to mention that the only three times in history Iran has started firing ballistic missiles at Israel—the missiles that Dubowitz and Stephens and Meade and Frum says Iran’s “mullahs” shouldn’t be allowed to have—were in response to those three unequivocal provocations.

If Dubowitz were to acknowledge such facts, he might have to entertain the possibility that there’s some truth to the claim that Iran’s ballistic missiles are meant to serve a defensive function—as a deterrent to Israeli attack. And if Dubowitz headed down that path, who knows where he might wind up? He might even start entertaining the possibility that, whatever the intrinsic motivations of such Iranian “proxies” as Hamas and Hezbollah, they, too, from Iran’s point of view, are meant to serve a deterrent function. (It was only after Israel degraded both to the point of near-impotence that it started launching military assaults on Iran—so apparently they had indeed been serving that function.)

And this, in turn, could lead Dubowitz to what for him would be a kind of hell on Earth: a vantage point from which both Israel and Iran are seen as countries that feel deeply insecure and do things out of defensive motivation that look offensive to the other side. In this view of the Israel-Iran relationship, there is a basically symmetrical cognitive empathy deficit, and its malign effects intensify via a positive feedback cycle, and to the extent that either side is to blame, both sides are. And if there’s one thing the Mark Dubowitzes of the world hate, it’s moral symmetry.

President Trump seems to have accepted the one-sided narrative that America’s many influential Iran hawks have promulgated. At least, that would help explain why he abandoned the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran in his first term—why he wasn’t satisfied with Iran just agreeing not to build a nuclear bomb and submitting to a strict system of monitoring and inspections that guaranteed compliance, but demanded that it go further and do various things that we demand of no other nation. That would also help explain why he chose to attack Iran a month ago rather than persist in negotiations that could have gotten him a deal at least as good as the Obama deal and almost certainly better.

Trump isn’t the only US president who deserves blame here. If President Biden had wanted a restoration of the nuclear deal that Trump jettisoned, he almost certainly could have had that early in his term. But he, like Trump, demanded more. The Iranians, as Biden official Rob Malley explained to me on the NonZero podcast, didn’t buy the idea that they should be the ones to make new concessions even though America was the country that had reneged on the deal in the first place. It wouldn’t have taken a superhuman exercise of cognitive empathy on Biden’s part to anticipate such a reaction. In any event, by the time he reconciled himself to the Iranian view and softened his demands, politics within Iran had shifted toward a harder line. So no deal was done.

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My claim, above, that more robust and widely deployed cognitive empathy could transform US foreign policy, and help us avoid lots of wars, is not the kind of claim that can be convincingly corroborated in the course of a single issue of a newsletter. In fact, it’s a challenging claim to corroborate even in longer form. One reason is that cognitive empathy deficit can impede prospects for peace in so many different ways. Another is that the chains of causality leading to wars can be long and complex, and there’s rarely a single critical juncture where doing a better job of perspective taking would definitely and demonstrably have made the difference.

Still, it’s possible to identify junctures where cognitive empathy could have plausibly made the difference. I’ll close with a quick look at several such junctures in one very long long chain of causality: the chain that culminated in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. At various steps along the way, more cognitive empathy by various actors—Russia, Ukraine, the US—might have made a difference. I’ll confine my examples to ones involving the US.

1. NATO’s vow in 2008, at the behest of George W. Bush, to eventually admit Ukraine as a member. Here the problem wasn’t, strictly speaking, a lack of cognitive empathy. US Ambassador to Moscow Bill Burns had plenty of that; he saw how threatening Moscow would find the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine. He even predicted that a commitment to such membership could lead Russia to cause trouble in Crimea and the Donbass, which indeed happened. The problem, rather, was that Burns’s repeated attempts to convey this perspective to the White House—he even wrote a memo titled “Nyet means Nyet!”—were unavailing. So Bush strongarmed reluctant European leaders into making the commitment to Ukrainian membership. And this commitment thereafter colored Moscow’s views of developments in Ukraine. For example:

2. The Maidan Revolution of 2014. In retrospect, President Obama might have realized that, if the US conspicuously and vocally supported a protest movement that aimed to depose a Russia-friendly Ukrainian president—and especially if that goal was realized violently, as it was—Vladimir Putin might start feeling insecure about the long-term lease that entitled Russia to maintain a key naval base in Crimea. And, since most Crimeans actually preferred the prospect of Russian rule to the reality of Ukrainian rule, Putin might snatch Crimea almost effortlessly. Which he did, heightening the tensions that eventually led to war.

3. The original decision in the 1990s to expand NATO. As with the 2008 vow to admit Ukraine to NATO, the problem here wasn’t a lack of cognitive empathy per se. Plenty of Russia experts warned that NATO expansion was a bad idea. George Kennan, the most famous of those experts (known, somewhat misleadingly, as the architect of the Cold War doctrine of containment), said: “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake… This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves…. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are—but this is just wrong.”

Bill Clinton was surely aware of this view. But for whatever constellation of reasons—perhaps including such considerations as donations from arms makers and Polish-American votes in the Midwest—he chose not to act on it.

This points to a challenge: Even when national leaders manage to see the national interest clearly, with full illumination from cognitive empathy, they need to resist the temptation to sacrifice that interest to their own political interest. And that kind of virtue, as I suggested last week, doesn’t seem to be in abundant supply.

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0:00 Teaser
1:00 Holy Week in Andalusia, and the Christian cross as branding
6:50 Why Bob is skeptical of Trump's diplomacy
11:09 Trump's hand got weaker and he doesn't even know it
14:11 Killing Iran's navy chief won't reopen the Strait of Hormuz
17:20 Nikita: "I find him weirdly persuasive on a hypnotist kind of level"
20:26 The Iran war's secret winner: Vladimir Putin
24:49 Bob checked back into AI podcasts and came out scared
29:55 "Every time I see tribalism on parade, I think: we're toast on AI"
35:45 Russia's Internet shutdowns
47:35 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Nikita Petrov (https://psychopolitica.substack.com). Recorded March 26, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Nikita’s newsletter:

Psychopolitica

Russian psychedelia in exile 🍄

By Nikita Petrov

Overtime titles:
Bill Maher’s Mark Twain Prize: why Twain would be horrified.
$20K drones vs. million-dollar Patriots.
Who rebuilds world order after this?
AI arbitration and a council of sovereign AIs.
ICE at airports and Bannon’s polling station plan.
How Spain’s cannabis clubs emerged through courts.
How smoking bans changed Central Park.
Gummies, CBD, and THC.
When AI agents start negotiating with each other.
Spain’s Semana Santa.

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0:00 Teaser
1:09 What (or who) is the Iran war for?
13:41 Joe Kent and the MAGA rift over Israel
24:44 Does antisemitism speech policing foment antisemitism?
39:39 What Ron’s Substack has that others don’t
44:40 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Ron Kampeas (https://ronkampeas.substack.com, Jewish Telegraphic Agency). Recorded March 24, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Ron’s Substack:

Ron’s Substack

My personal Substack

By Ron Kampeas

Overtime titles:

0:00 Did Israel push America into Iraq
10:04 What the Iran war reveals about US-Israel relations
16:26 Is Iranian hostility to Israel and America "rational"?
33:27 A few kind words about David Wurmser
36:39 Two-state solutions that might have been
39:24 Israel’s eyes and ears inside Iran

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Several decades ago, I learned something that surprised me: Game theorists don’t consider war a zero-sum game.

In retrospect, I’m surprised that I was surprised. I already knew that nuclear war is a non-zero-sum game (since the outcome can obviously be lose-lose—as in, everybody dies). But I guess I’d thought of nuclear war as some kind of unique and aberrant subspecies of war, rather than what it is: just a particularly pronounced example of the fact that wars often lead to massive death and destruction on both sides. Does it really make sense to say that the “victorious” nations in World War I, having lost at least 10 million lives, were better off than before the war started? Is it even clear that they fared better than the “losing” nations, which lost a bit more than half that many lives? By what calculation can you say that the sum of the fortunes of the two sides was zero rather than subzero?

I didn’t initially welcome this news flash from game theory. At the time, I was starting to work on a book (which wound up being called Nonzero), and, in ways that aren’t worth getting into, the non-zero-sumness of war complicated an appealingly simple narrative framework I’d been planning to employ. But, that inconvenience aside, the fact that war is non-zero-sum seems like potentially good news. If nations rationally pursue their self-interest, shouldn’t the knowledge that war often makes both sides worse off discourage them from starting wars?

In theory, maybe. But, back in the real world, there’s a massively destructive war going on in the Middle East.

Well, we might as well put it to good use! I think viewing the Iran War in game theoretical terms can shed light on the question of why humankind seems so bad at respecting the logic of game theory—why nations keep getting into wars that, history tells us, may inflict huge costs on all concerned.

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But to get that kind of illumination, we need to first add a little complexity to our game theoretical model—two dimensions of complexity, to be exact.

The first dimension is one that may have already occurred to you—as a kind of objection to how simple my initial explanation of war’s non-zero-sumness was. I was acting as if the consequences of war are confined to the number of lives lost. And there’s more to life than lives! There’s territory, for example. Right now Israel is seizing Lebanese territory after driving off Lebanese residents—and if the past is any guide, Israel may hang on to the territory. And every acre it gains is an acre Lebanon loses: zero-sum.

Another kind of benefit of war is lasting security gains. Benjamin Netanyahu would probably argue that holding on to that Lebanese land enhances Israel’s security by creating a buffer zone, and he’s definitely argued that inflicting havoc on Iran will enhance Israel’s security. Whether or not these things turn out to be true, it’s true that they could be true; there is such a thing as enhanced security, and sometimes it’s achieved by war.

So if you add this dimension—if you expand your tabulation of war’s consequences beyond loss of life, to include things like land and future security—it’s possible for a nation to come out ahead even after accounting for fatalities and other human casualties. Which means it’s possible, in principle, for a war to have a win-lose outcome, even if wars are often lose-lose. So maybe it’s not so irrational for nations to keep embarking on war after all.

Maybe. But, if you want to explain why war is such a stubbornly persistent feature of human life, I don’t think this particular dimension of added game theoretical complexity is the ticket. I’d put more emphasis on the second added dimension. And, actually, maybe “dimension” is a misleading term here. Maybe you should think of this not as a dimension but rather as a whole second level of accounting—the level of domestic politics. To put it another way: The interests of the people who decide whether to launch wars are different from the interests of the nations they lead. A nation’s leaders can benefit politically from a war even if the nation, on balance, doesn’t benefit from it.

Consider Bibi Netanyahu. There’s no doubt that he’s benefited politically from Israel’s being so often in a state of conflict. Before October 7, 2023, for example, he was deeply unpopular and was spending part of his political energy trying to wriggle out of criminal prosecution. But, even though October 7 represented an epic security lapse that was clearly his fault, he masterfully turned it into a get-out-of-jail free card. By sustaining the war on Gaza well past the point where Hamas had been effectively neutralized, he rose in the public’s esteem. And then last summer, in the final months of the war, he started a whole new conflict—with Iran—that was deemed a triumph and helped keep him popular even after his rate of killing Gazans had dropped from wartime levels to mere ceasefire levels.

Will the scorched earth policy he pursued in Gaza—and is now pursuing in Iran and Lebanon—be good for Israel’s security in the long run? I’m skeptical; I think that if Israel wants lasting security, increasing the number of people in the Middle East and the world more broadly who hate it, and the intensity with which they hate it, isn’t the optimal strategy. But I could be wrong about that. In the annals of history, the ruthless deployment of brute force has proved effective with disconcerting frequency.

In any event, I think it’s clearer that Bibi’s belligerent policies have been good for Bibi than that they’ll be good for Israel in the long run. And however far back you go into his political history, you see the same pattern: He’s a deft sustainer of tension and conflict with Israel’s enemies. He has done his best to sabotage a two-state solution, and he has at times maneuvered to boost Hamas at the expense of more moderate elements in Gaza. And, conveniently, these two goals have sometimes dovetailed. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Netanyahu, in a 2019 meeting with Likud members of the Knesset, explained why he tolerated the Qatari government’s financial support of Hamas: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” One effect of all of this was to sustain and heighten the sense that Israelis were under siege—much to Bibi’s political benefit.

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Same goes for Iran’s political leadership: It has benefited politically from having enemies. The late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei found it politically useful to depict America and Israel as implacable foes.

Of course, over the past few weeks, America and Israel have been acting like implacable foes of Iran—so Khamenei doesn’t seem to have been fabricating enemies out of whole cloth. And you could say something similar about Netanyahu: Yes, he’s played up the threats from Hamas and Hezbollah, but the threats themselves were real.

This fact—that the external threats that national leaders can profitably highlight and hype tend to have some basis in reality—makes it hard to isolate the forces that drive nations into war. Often when a nation initiates a war you can come up with both a plausible national security rationale and a plausible domestic political rationale. And it’s hard to say which played a bigger role.

One great thing about President Trump is that he takes the guesswork out of this exercise. There was no remotely plausible national security threat that justified attacking Venezuela, and the same goes for his attack on Iran. His claim that there was some kind of nuclear threat is ridiculous. Iran was nowhere near having a nuclear bomb and had just expressed a willingness to remain verifiably nuke free—and to make more concessions as part of a new nuclear deal than it made as part of the perfectly adequate Obama nuclear deal, the one that Trump catastrophically trashed during his first term. In fact, it was during the negotiations that had revealed this willingness on Iran’s part that Trump launched his surprise attack on Iran three weeks ago.

In the absence of a plausible strategic rationale, we’re forced to conclude that Trump launched this war because he thought it would be a political winner. Sure, he probably told himself it would also work out fine for America. But for a president to think that such a war actively and importantly served America’s national security interests, he’d have to be more clueless than I think Trump is, which would be quite a feat.

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Why exactly Trump thought attacking Iran would be a political winner—how he came to think this was going to be Venezuela all over again—is unclear. Was he convinced of this by Bibi or Mark Levin or Marco Rubio or Lindsey Graham or…? Hard to say what the constellation of key influencers was, but in any event their mission wasn’t exactly mission impossible. Trump isn’t a complicated man, and he’s never had a deep understanding of the world, and he seems increasingly detached from reality.

Anyway, how exactly this fiasco took shape isn’t our subject today. Our subject is the more generic one of why wars keep happening. And my point is that the answer lies at least as much at the level of domestic politics as at the level of geopolitics and national interest. At the level of domestic politics, wars can easily make sense; they can be win-lose or even win-win. For more than 15 years, Netanyahu and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah benefited politically from each other’s enmity—until finally Netanyahu’s enmity proved lethal, and the relationship shifted from win-win to win-lose.

I think highlighting the fundamentally political, as opposed to geopolitical, causes of wars could make them less common. The more clearly people understand where the real motivation usually lies, the more inclined they’ll be to greet the next push for war with appropriate cynicism.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and some of them are what you could call foreign policy establishment podcasts—they’re produced by, say, the Council on Foreign Relations or some very buttoned up DC think tank, or they feature conversations among the kinds of people who work at such places. And, almost invariably, the people on these podcasts, in gravely assessing the motivations that start and then steer wars, stay at the level of geopolitics and national interest and assiduously avoid the level of domestic politics. To hear them talk you’d think that Trump was Metternich—or at least a dimmer version of Metternich—rather than a former Reality TV star who is just trying to keep his ratings up by staging a new spectacle that’s more eye-catching than the last one.

This kind of credulous discourse is a disservice to the nation. It sustains the myth that the people who steer American foreign policy are by and large worth taking seriously. They’re not. The politicians who steer it are for the most part just trying to get re-elected—and will serve whichever cluster of special interests can further that cause. And the “experts” who help steer it, including many of the voices on these podcasts, are people who managed to get hired by think tanks that, for the most part, are funded by the same special interests that are corrupting those politicians.

The better people understand all this—the more cynical they are about their political leaders and opinion leaders—the less susceptible they’ll be to the endless threat inflation that is the lifeblood of the military industrial complex and the various narrower lobbies that work hand in glove with it.

So, yes, war among nations is a non-zero-sum game, a lose-lose endeavor more often than not. But for the national leaders who keep pushing us into those wars, there’s more upside. We need to change that.

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This week on the NonZero podcast Daniel Levy, who has worked as a negotiator under two Israeli prime ministers, talked about, among other things, the increasingly religious character of Israeli politics and how that has influenced foreign policy:

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0:00 Teaser
1:05 Overtime preview: a civil(-ish) debate on Israel-Palestine
4:22 How vibe-coding changed Liron’s life
9:59 Portents of the AI jobpocalypse
18:56 What can humans do that AI agents can’t?
28:04 The Darwinian case for AI doom
31:26 OpenClaw vs SkyNet
37:48 Liron: I love AI! We need to stop it.
44:27 Amodei, Altman, and the Pentagon triangle
53:04 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Liron Shapira (Pause AI, Doom Debates). Recorded March 10, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Liron's Substack:

Overtime titles:

0:00 Google’s strangely stagnant stock
2:59 The power of the Martian POV
9:19 What do Israelis and Palestinians actually want?
29:01 The Palestinian statehood question
52:17 Would Liron think differently if he were Palestinian?
1:01:16 Bob says the rationalists are confused about Bayesianism
1:05:05 The (double) crux of Bob and Liron’s disagreement
1:09:25 What Bob and Liron *do* agree on

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