Can a single leader fix a broken world? Or does the United Nations simply reflect our deepest global divisions without being able to bridge them?

In this episode of We’re All Going To Die!!, we are joined by Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, former UN Deputy Secretary-General, to discuss the future of global diplomacy as the UN prepares to select a new Secretary-General. With the world facing unprecedented existential threats - from AI and nuclear proliferation to climate change and proliferating state-based conflicts - we explore whether the UN is still fit for purpose and what kind of leader it will take to navigate these turbulent times.

What You’ll Discover:

- Regulating Existential Threats: The urgent need for a “mediator-in-chief” to tackle challenges that transcend national boundaries: from the renewed nuclear arms race, to the considerable risk that Artificial Intelligence will run out of control and the reality that the UN itself did a better job of describing climate risk than containing it.

- The Search for a “Bull in Sheep’s Clothing”: Why the most successful UN Secretaries-General are often underestimated bureaucrats who hide their sharp teeth until after they are selected.

- Navigating a Fragmented World: How the rise of a new two-block global system led by the US and China is gridlocking the Security Council and pushing nations toward rival institutions.

If the UN were dismantled tomorrow, we would have to reinvent it immediately. While the organisation may no longer be able to promise a perfect world, its true value today lies in its ability to keep humanity from the brink of catastrophe.

The future of Artificial Intelligence is too important to leave to computer scientists alone. Chris Olah of Anthropic said this at a symposium with Pope Leo. In this episode we bring an example.

Alexandros Washburn is an urban planner and architect. He became fascinated by the power of AI to model urban resilience. He realized the models were impressive, but wrong. His fix offers a path to control AI agents without engineering endless guardrails into each agent, an approach that has visibly failed in several rogue incidents.

His solution? Form AI agents in digital cities that can imbue in each of them behavior similar to the good citizenship cities have been inculcating in people since before ancient Athens.

He is building just such a digital city, called Meta Gotham. Will it work? No way to know yet. But at least he is forcing the conversation outside the box of the frontier AI labs. His new book is Chatting with Barbarians: Can Cities Civilize AI?

Pope Leo XIV has entered the AI debate with a blunt challenge: artificial intelligence needs to be “disarmed.” Mike Oreskes and Edie Lush unpack Magnifica Humanitas with Fordham president Tania Tetlow, exploring AI, war, Silicon Valley power, colonialism, conscience, and why the humanities may matter as much as engineering in deciding who this technology serves.

00:00 Cold open: “AI needs to be disarmed”

01:07 Welcome to We’re All Gonna Die

03:06 Tania Tetlow joins the conversation

06:00 What Magnifica Humanitas means

09:52 Silicon Valley, Babel, and technological hubris

15:35 Who Pope Leo is and why his voice matters

17:53 Chris Olah on why AI labs need outside critics

25:50 Listening to people left out of AI decisions

27:35 AI, colonialism, data, and the Global South

33:24 Why the Industrial Revolution frame matters

39:35 Closing: every person is unique and irreplaceable