By Marc Eliot Stein, World BEYOND War, August 29, 2025
Sometimes a podcaster just needs to talk to an old friend. Tommaso Delfanti is an engineer in Northern Italy who shares with me an eccentric interest in ethical philosophy and an urgent concern for a planet that seems to be rapidly destroying itself with corrupt wealth, feckless leadership and contagious violence. We bonded over a decade ago while arguing for opposite positions in an online debate about the philosophy of Ayn Rand, and have continued to touch base since then to compare notes between New York City and northern Italy and further our original quest as two rational engineers desperately trying to think up a path towards world peace.
I asked Tommaso to join me for a completely free-form conversation on the World BEYOND War podcast, without a plan for where we would end up. We ended up talking a lot about the war between Russia and Ukraine, inspired by the vaporous “peace meetings” between Trump, Putin, Zelensky and various representatives of European countries, the European Union and NATO that took place in Europe and North America this month, producing no results except for increased weapons sales.
We also talked about Israel’s horrifying genocide in Gaza and the crisis in South Sudan, compared Trump’s rise to power in USA with Silvio Berlusconi’s earlier rise to power in Italy, questioned Sweden and Finland’s entry into NATO, pondered the question of ethics without religion, disdained the enshittification of the Internet, compared anarcho-capitalism with anarcho-pacifism, and chatted about the writings of Elinor Ostrom, Rene Girard and Giovannino Guareschi. We ran out of time before we could begin talking about two separate topics we both considered important: crises of migrant abuse in both USA and Europe, and recent trends in artificial intelligence. I hope to invite Tommaso back soon to pick up where we left off.
An unstructured conversation can sometimes drift into far corners, so I really appreciated it near the end of this discussion when Tommaso used engineering language to bring us back to our key topic: the futility of war.
“Even from the most, let me say, arrogant, Ayn-Rand-esque, crony capitalist position, war is an inefficiency. I understand than on an individual level, somebody can gain from the war machine, but taking a bigger control volume for the analysis, war is the destruction of resources.”
Musical excerpt: “Govanni wannabe” by Pinguini Tattici Nucleari.
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