Mato just raised pre-seed Read more
Podcast charts
Published by Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Everything seems to be accelerating: geopolitics, technology, security threats, the dispersal of information. At times, it feels like a blur. But beneath the dizzying proliferation of events, discoveries, there are deeper trends that can be grasped and understood through conversation and debate. That’s the idea behind Stop the World, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s podcast on international affairs and security. Each week, we cast a freeze-frame around the blur of events and bring some clarity and insight on defence, technology, cyber, geopolitics and foreign policy.
On the charts
Every published chart this podcast appears in, in the snapshot behind this page. Each one links to the chart it came off.
The Mato Topic Intelligence Platform does not report this podcast as charting in a published category in this snapshot.
From the feed
The latest episodes published to this podcast’s own RSS feed. Titles and descriptions are the publisher’s.
Retired Major-General Roger Noble AO, DSC, CSC joins STW to talk about his new book, My Long War, covering his remarkable career over six operational deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan and East Timor. The book is part memoir, part reflection on warfare and humanity, part critique of conventional military and strategic thinking. It pulls no punches while honouring the people he served with, and it's packed with cracking anecdotes from an extraordinary life. As Roger puts it, some people simply can't be reasoned with—so however horrible it is, sometimes it has to be fought. His memorable analogy of one of the most famous fictional villains of recent decades is a stand out for fans of American author Cormac McCarthy. Roger talks about leadership, about understanding one’s enemy, and about working with coalition partners from the Americans to the Iraqis. He shares his criticisms of the disconnect between strategy and tactics in Afghanistan, his thoughts on the war crimes allegations stemming from Australia's involvement there and his views on the question of accountability. And he discusses what six deployments taught him about the science of warfare and the need for rational analysis. Roger spent time with an international team destroying Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons stockpiles in 1992, returned to Iran in 2005 during the second Gulf War, and went back a third time in 2016 to help liberate Mosul from ISIS. He also served in East Timor in 2000-01 and twice in Afghanistan. He retired in 2021, and went on to become Australia’s Counter-Terrorism Ambassador. Roger Noble, My Long War : https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/My-Long-War/Roger-Noble/9781923720046
On the sidelines of the ADSTAR Summit, STW speaks with Paul Robards, Defence's Chief Data Integration Officer, who also has responsibility for the Defence Artificial Intelligence Centre. Paul spent 30 years in the Australian Army before taking on the task of turning Defence's vast data holdings into genuine capability. The conversation covers Defence's current AI use, the perils of risk-aversion, minimum viable capability, data and AI literacy among senior leaders, and where a middle power like Australia can meaningfully contribute alongside allies and partners. Paul draws a sharp distinction between bolting AI onto existing processes and redesigning those processes around it. He makes the case that data is where a large part the advantage lies, and that siloed data stops a commander seeing across people, materiel, logistics and intelligence at once. He walks through the OODA loop in a modern battlespace saturated with sensors, and where AI can help at each stage while humans stay firmly at the point of decision. The conversation closes on how fast the future is arriving, and why agility matters more than perfection. Paul will also be joining STW's AI Masterclass in Canberra on 14 September. For more information check out the website .
This Saturday marks ASPI's 25th birthday – the date the institute began operations in 2001. To mark it, STW is joined by Hugh White, ASPI's founding executive director, and Justin Bassi, its current executive director, for an in-depth conversation about how the institute came to be and what it's for. Hugh recalls the establishment of ASPI by the Howard government – including a fateful plane trip with Howard's first defence minister Ian McLachlan – and a first few weeks that turned out rather differently from what he was expecting. He discusses ASPI's early impact and the experience of publicly challenging the 2003 Iraq invasion to which Howard had committed Australian troops. Hugh and Justin discuss how a think tank should balance the issues of the day against the over-the-horizon questions no one is asking yet, in traditional defence and in emerging areas such as critical technologies. They talk about how deep into the fundamentals of strategic policy a think tank should probe, the importance of challenging orthodoxy, and the US alliance, AUKUS and the state of Australia's strategic policy debate. Despite their different views of the world, their evident respect for one another shows that healthy, robust debate is very much possible in 2026. For more on the bipartisan commitment to contestability, look out for a piece this weekend jointly authored by John Howard and Kim Beazley.
Australia’s new Chief of the Defence Force, Admiral Mark Hammond, joins STW on the sidelines of the ADSTAR Summit in Adelaide to share his thoughts on the integration of advanced technology into defence. It’s a quickie but a goodie, with the CDF packing plenty of insights into a few minutes. We cover the key areas where technology is making a difference, especially improving the survivability of Australian personnel; long-range fires; the value of nuclear powered submarines; the close tech relationship with the US; artificial intelligence; the relationship with industry and why warfare will necessarily remain a human affair. This is a great episode while you make your morning coffee or your commute to work.
STW speaks with Anton Leicht, one of the most compelling voices on the geopolitics and economics of artificial intelligence. Anton has become a leading authority on how middle powers such as Australia can carve out a role in the global AI value chain and avoid being pushed to the periphery as the technology advances. Anton is the author of the influential Substack Threading the Needle and a fellow with the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He discusses Australia’s opportunity to build data centres to train and run AI, how that would help guarantee future access to advanced American models such as Claude and GPT, the prospects for sovereign models built here, and how Australia can sustain a cooperative relationship with the US built on mutual dependence. The conversation then turns to AI and security: keeping models safe while avoiding a concentration of power in government hands, the responsibilities of the AI labs themselves, and compromise proposals such as third-party experts acting as safety watchdogs. Anton closes with his views on the likely economic impacts of AI and the big questions around the future of work. He’s a frontier thinker on the political economy of AI, and is closely watched by policymakers, fellow experts and industry leaders alike.
As a relatively small military, the Australian Defence Force needs to fight and win through advantages such as superior technology. Chief Defence Scientist Professor Tanya Monro, AC, is in charge of figuring out smart ways to do that. Tanya kicks off our short series recorded at the ADSTAR Summit in Adelaide, Australia's premier defence science and technology gathering. ASPI joined the summit as podcast partner alongside organisers the Defence Science and Technology Group. Tanya talks about the newly launched Defence Innovation, Science and Technology Strategy and its three core objectives: generating asymmetric advantage, accelerating innovative solutions into capability, and reinforcing an integrated ecosystem through closer work with industry and international partners. She gives her perspective on how to harness the remarkable innovation happening across technology fields, including AI, and channel it into a stronger defence force. She walks through the six priority areas Defence is focusing on, and the balance between work that delivers immediate new capabilities and longer-term fundamental research that may not pay dividends for years but is nonetheless vital. A note that this was recorded on the sidelines of an event with more than 2000 guests, so there's some background noise. We’ll roll out further ADSTAR episodes over the next few weeks. Links: https://www.defence.gov.au/about/strategic-planning/2026-defence-innovation-science-technology-strategy
As foreign minister of Lithuania from 2020 to 2024, few people had the front row seat of Gabrielius Landsbergis to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Trump’s return to the White House and Europe’s response to both. Since leaving office, he has become one of Europe’s clearest and most forceful champions for democratic values, for support for Ukraine, and for resisting the aggression of Russia and the risks posed by other authoritarian nations, including China. This interview comes at a time that Ukraine is showing signs of regaining the upper hand on the battlefield and increasing discussions about the possibility of the US administration providing patriot system licenses to Ukraine. Gabrielius talks to Dave about whether Putin’s grip on power is as secure as it appears. Gabrielius is not for waiting though, assessing that it is too risky for Europe to rely on Russia losing, the US making the decisive difference or NATO 3.0 taking shape. Instead, Gabrielius has an innovative solution that would create a genuine coalition of the ‘willing-and-able’. Gabrielius also talks about why China has largely escaped meaningful consequences for backing Russia’s war effort. He discusses the implications of the Iran war on US credibility as a global leader for the world order that Gabrielius believes must be defended by all those who believe in democratic values and principles.
Janet Egan is a senior fellow and deputy director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, and one of the most respected thinkers on AI and national security — globally and from an Australian perspective. She joins STW at the perfect moment after PM Anthony Albanese’s AI speech and the big news about OpenAI’s agents going rogue. The conversation opens with the OpenAI hack of online AI repository Hugging Face—which Janet calls a very big deal—and works through the implications for cybersecurity attackers and defenders. She addresses the argument that safeguards on frontier models are restricting their use and handing an advantage to China, weighs the merits of open source and open weight models, and reads the clues in Xi Jinping's recent AI speech about China's current strategy. The conversation then turns to Australia. Janet offers her assessment of Albanese's AI speech and examines the case for Australia to build data centres capable of training frontier models like Claude, GPT and Gemini. She covers the fraught AI copyright debate before finishing with thoughts on global AI governance and the prospects for US-China cooperation to reduce the most catastrophic risks.
Taiwan is the target of more information operation attacks than anywhere else on earth, most of them originating in mainland China and aimed at dividing Taiwanese society and eroding the resolve to resist Beijing. AI is supercharging that barrage. And to tell us about the impact and how Taiwan is fighting back, we’ve spoken with You-Hao Lai, a researcher at Taiwan's Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology. You-Hao starts by giving us his takeaways on Chinese leader Xi Jinping's keynote at China's global AI conference, including on Beijing's push to ensure that the world embeds Chinese technology, with Chinese standards, into its systems rather than American alternatives. He then covers the ways that AI is transforming China's information operations: the scale, speed and sophistication of the attacks, the narratives deployed, the strategic purpose behind them, and documented cases that illustrate how rapidly things are evolving. You-Hao then walks through Taiwan's whole-of-nation response, organised around “four Cs”—cutting, clarifying, curbing and cultivating—a framework that reflects years of hard-won experience building national resilience against a relentless and well-resourced adversary. There are real lessons here for the rest of us.
Leading artificial intelligence company OpenAI prompted commentators to dig deep into their bag of Hollywood sci-fi dystopia comparisons this week when it announced a pair of its frontier models had broken out of a secure test environment and hacked into online AI library Hugging Face. Today, David Wroe and Justin Bassi pick out two of this week’s dizzying array of events that stretch from the Saudi-US nuclear deal to the South China Sea, and dissect in detail the stunning OpenAI revelation and the pressure that China faced during the ASEAN foreign ministers’ meeting in Manila, Philippines. No one got hurt when the AI models went marauding in the real world, but the episode has jolted the tech industry, governments and the public. Questions are now flying about regulation, safety and global governance as leading AI labs in the United States and China race to get ahead with the most powerful models. The twist in the tale is that Hugging Face had to use an open-source Chinese model to defend itself against the rogue AI agent attack, prompting opponents of AI regulation in the US to demand fewer restrictions on their own models, and AI safety experts to sharpen their calls for the two tech superpowers to talk earnestly about common safeguards. Meanwhile, Australia announced it would provide drones to the Philippines for maritime security amid China’s latest efforts to squeeze the Southeast Asian nation in the South China Sea. Foreign Minister Penny Wong visited the Philippines Coast Guard headquarters where she blasted China’s “destabilising and dangerous conduct” at sea.
Can Australia count on continued access to the most advanced frontier AI models from the US? And if not, what should it do about it? That’s the starting point for a wide-ranging conversation with three American guests who bring deep expertise across cyber, AI and strategic competition. Michael Sulmeyer is Professor of the Practice at Georgetown University and until recently was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy. Mike Kuiken is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Vice Chair of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Sophie Mayo is a non-resident fellow at the United States Studies Centre and a research assistant at Georgetown’s Centre for Security and Emerging Technology. Together they cover Australia’s push to build large-scale AI data centres and whether that could generate real leverage in the global technology race; the cyber implications of powerful AI models and why old software, unpatched systems and critical infrastructure remain stubborn vulnerabilities even as AI gives defenders new tools; and China — whether the US still has a coherent strategy for competing with Beijing, and how AI is converging with biotech, quantum and other emerging technologies. The conversation also takes in AUKUS, the Australia-US alliance, export controls, venture capital and talent flows. These can sound like separate issues. STW’s guests make clear they’re really all part of the same question: how does Australia make itself useful, ambitious and strategically relevant in a much tougher technological era?
Dean Ball is one of the most influential thinkers in AI policy right now — principal author of the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, author of the widely-read Substack Hyperdimensional , and until very recently a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. STW grabbed him just before he started a new role at OpenAI, which made for some propitious timing. The conversation covers a lot of ground. Dean gives his views on two ideas floated by his new boss Sam Altman in the hours before recording: a global governance body for AI standards, and reports that Altman has been in talks with the Trump administration about giving the US government a stake in OpenAI. He also talks about his broader outlook on AI and power — including the argument that the level of AI capability in government hands shouldn’t get too far out of proportion to what’s available to everyone else. Dean discusses the role of safeguards on frontier models, and makes the case for independent third-party auditors sitting between governments and AI companies as a check on both risk and excessive concentrations of power. He covers the opportunities for middle powers like Australia in data centres and rare earths, the realities of US incentives to withhold its most powerful capabilities even from trusted allies, and the evolution of institutions in an AI age — a topic he’s writing a book on. He finishes on a note of cautious optimism. It’ll be worth watching how his thinking evolves from inside OpenAI. Hyperdimensional: Hyperdimensional | Dean W. Ball | Substack FT Op-Ed by Sam Altman
How should middle powers such as Australia and Canada maximise their strategic clout in an age of increasingly assertive great powers? Raquel Garbers spent nearly three decades in Canadian defence, security and intelligence, including a stint as Director General for Strategic Defence Policy at the Canadian Department of National Defence, where she served as the principal architect of Canada’s defence policy. As an ASPI Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Raquel brought that experience to last week’s ASPI Defence Conference, where she made a memorable contribution on the role of middle powers in an age of uncertainty. Raquel has watched up close what Donald Trump has meant for the US-Canada relationship. But she's clear-eyed about the limits of what democratic middle powers can achieve without US alignment, and unsentimental about the fact that great powers are great powers. Her answer to that challenge is what she calls "coalitions of the capable": flexible, fast and fierce groupings of like-minded states that can maximise their collective agency. It's a realistic and pragmatic framework for navigating a world that looks very different from the one the post-war order was built for—and a conversation that reflects the enormous importance of these questions for the fates of middle powers such as Australia.
Do intelligence agencies need to rethink how they deliver assessments to political leaders in the AI age? That's the question at the heart of a new ASPI report, ‘Reading the Room: Redesigning Intelligence Product for the AI Age’. Today STW sits down with its author to dig into the issue. ASPI senior fellow Chris Taylor joins FiveCast co-founder Duane Rivett—whose firm provides open-source intelligence to the security community—to talk through what needs to change and why. The report argues that while Australia's intelligence community has invested heavily in collection with strong results, the way assessments are delivered to decision-makers hasn't kept pace. The conversation covers changing information consumption habits across generations; how AI can adapt and even personalise intelligence products for different leaders and officials; the prospect of intelligence chatbots that can answer policymakers' questions in real time; and the enduring importance of human expert judgement. They also address the risks: losing nuance in a business defined by uncertainty, and the accountability gap when a machine — like a self-driving car — can't be held liable for getting it wrong. Read the report, ‘Reading the Room: Redesigning Intelligence Product for the AI Age’ .
Nicole Giles is Deputy Director of Policy and Partnerships at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service—and she visited ASPI in Canberra to talk through what she calls the three Vs: the velocity, variety, and volume of threats facing Canada and its allies right now. AI-accelerated disinformation that once took weeks to develop can now be deployed in seconds. Violent extremism investigations that once unfolded over months now move from online radicalisation to potential threat action in days. And the sheer number of actors and threat types is growing. Nicole covers foreign interference and election meddling, economic security and IP theft, the rise of youth involvement in extremism, and a disturbing new category CSIS has had to formally define, nihilistic violent extremism—groups like the Maniac Murder Cult and 764, whose goal is simply violent chaos. She also talks about the “swords and shields” of AI for intelligence agencies, and why Five Eyes cooperation—including a specific Australia-Canada collaboration on over-the-horizon radar—is more important than ever. CSIS's annual report is, as STW notes, a good read, and Nicole is a compelling example of why public engagement has become a national security strategy in itself. Read the CSIS annual Public Report 2025 here .
This week, ASPI hosted a fireside conversation with Anne Neuberger, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Strategic Advisor to Cisco. Anne was Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor from 2021 to 2025. The conversation focused on cyber security and the impact of AI on geopolitics and cyber resilience. Coming off the back of President Trump’s Executive Order on AI and reports that Australia had been given access to Anthropic’s Mythos model, we decided the conversation was an important one to share with our Stop the World listeners. Hosted by ASPI’s Executive Director, Justin Bassi, he and Anne canvassed the game changing role of artificial intelligence for cyber offence and defence, why democracies need to be the ones to set AI standards, and the lessons that can be learned from our 5G and TikTok experiences when it comes to global AI adoption. This event was held in partnership with Cisco.
Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly central to warfighting. And the firms that build it are critical partners to militaries around the world. Once such company is Britain’s Faculty AI, whose head of defence Andrew van der Lem joins us this week. The conversation covers electronic warfare and the competition to dominate the electromagnetic spectrum; how AI can identify, classify, and act on signals no human could process in time; and the acceleration of military decision-making—a factor in US operational superiority during the recent war in the Middle East. Andrew also draws on lessons from Ukraine, where new technology hits the battlefield every few weeks and doctrine has to adapt in real time. And he describes a major NATO exercise Faculty took part in — preparing allied forces for a potential Russian invasion of Estonia, run out of a disused London tube station. Finally, Andrew addresses the values question: why Faculty believes tech companies have a responsibility to engage with defence AI rather than leave it to others.
Today we’re joined by Kanishka Narayan, Britain’s Minister for AI and Online Safety, who visited Australia last week to sign an MOU on cooperation between Britain’s illustrious AI Security Institute and Australia’s new AI Safety Institute. Kanishka, whose previous roles include a stint in tech investment, was described in a recent British tech publication as a minister who “really gets AI”—and it shows. He discusses his strong view on the need to put democratic values into the development of AI and to ensure it preserves human agency and trust. He discusses Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical on AI, the need for middle powers to establish places for themselves in the global AI industry, and his conviction that AI is going to transform all aspects of life, notably our economies and particularly employment—all for the better if we get the policies right.
ASPI this week released our Cost of Defence report which, as always, has taken a thorough and rigorous look at every dollar spent on defence in the budget. And to help us make sense of the $66.4 billion that Australia will be spending, we’re joined by our director of defence strategy, Mike Hughes. Mike is one of the report’s main authors along with Marc Ablong, Courtney Stewart and Linus Cohen. Their conclusion, in sum, is that Australia is “buying a future and is doing so by accepting that the ADF will be able to do less today”. Mike puts the dollars in context, welcoming the lift in spending but describing a program of approvals and spending that remains too slow. He explains the mismatch between rhetoric that the strategic environment is dire and getting worse, and reality is that the corresponding urgency isn’t there in the investment. He talks about Australia’s recent spending growth compared with other countries in the region including China, and the welcome boost to workforce but the decline in acquisition and sustainment spending, which will be an issue for the current force. He also walks us through the byzantine ways of calculating spending as a percentage of GDP and, most importantly, what actually needs to be done now, such as approving money for integrated air and missile defence and the so-called connective tissue that ensures readiness. Links: Read the cost of Defence: ASPI Defence budget brief 2026-2027 here
Yalkun Uluyol, China researcher at Human Rights Watch, joins us to discuss the repression of Uyghurs and other minority groups in China — and why human rights abuses are struggling to stay on the global agenda. Yalkun has spent years documenting abuses in Xinjiang, including mass surveillance, arbitrary detention, forced labour and the suppression of Uyghur identity and culture. He also brings a deeply personal perspective: his own father has been arbitrarily jailed. The conversation explores how the Chinese government is trying to reshape China’s global image, portraying Xinjiang as stable and harmonious despite extensive reporting by Human Rights Watch and others. Yalkun also discusses Beijing’s influence in international institutions, the intimidation of other countries, and the growing difficulty of conducting China research. At a time when wars, economic shocks, great-power competition and artificial intelligence dominate global attention, Yalkun makes the case for why human rights advocacy still matters — and how governments, researchers and citizens can keep these issues in view. The episode also looks at forced labour in Xinjiang and its links to global supply chains, from batteries to Labubu dolls.
Ranking source
Apple Podcasts rankings via the Mato Topic Intelligence Platform.
Observed September 19, 2026. Cached outside the daily freshness window; the positions keep the date they were taken on.
Apple and Apple Podcasts are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.
Pairs with
Bring this source into Mato to read its transferable patterns, then turn them into an original show for your own audience.