Podcast: The Sound of Soft Power

SoftPower/FulStories highlights the work of diplomats and RPCVs in global development

The clearest through line to understanding soft power in geopolitics may not run through policy at all, but through ecology. For decades, scientists believed trees competed for resources in silence. What they later discovered was something closer to a conversation of roots sharing nutrients, warning signals, and information through vast underground networks—an exchange so constant and essential that dependence, not isolation, proved essential for survival. 

Those unseen systems beneath the surface that allow life to endure are on the forefront of my mind as I log on to chat with Christopher Wurst, a former foreign service officer and the host of the hit podcast, SoftPower/FulStories. He is on the other side of the planet, in Slovenia, sitting in front of a glowing January Christmas tree and a window piled with snow. I am, admittedly, a little starstruck—he’s a seasoned foreign service officer having served in eight countries across four continents. I know a little about Slovenia as I once slept in a Slovenian train station with my backpack for a pillow, but that is information I have decided to withhold. 

Luckily, Wurst is the opposite of intimidating. A career diplomat with the instincts of a storyteller, he speaks with the cadence of someone who knows how to put others at ease. Not coincidentally, he holds a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and a master’s in education, an unusual background in the Foreign Service, and one that shapes the tone of his work. His curiosity without condescension is what makes SoftPower/FulStories resonate. 

“I do think as human beings that we are wired to receive stories,” Wurst tells me. “You can get up and tell people a bunch of data. This is great, but the listener forgets it all. But if you tell a really good anecdote or story, it might hit in a way that they remember it for the rest of their life.”

The storytelling podcast was conceived in the aftermath of sweeping aid cuts, and presents itself as part oral history, part campaign for programs lost. Wurst gathers voices rarely amplified in American discourse, including Peace Corps volunteers, diplomats, aid workers, and development professionals; people who keep showing up in places most Americans can’t find on a map, let alone imagine losing. Wurst is capturing stories from the ground up, where policy becomes personal.

“I’ve always thought Americans have such a limited view of what’s going on overseas,” Wurst explains. “If people knew, they might feel differently. Now there’s active disinformation about what goes on overseas. That makes it doubly hard to get through.”

SoftPower/FulStories uses first-person narratives to illuminate the quiet, often invisible work of diplomacy. It captures the human-scale impact of programs many Americans don’t even know exist, and the rapid erosion of those programs in the past year.

Throughout 2025, more than 300,000 civil servants lost their jobs and were forced to stop mid-project, including those at USAID, shrinking the workforce from 10,000 people to a few hundred. Career experts were escorted out with fifteen minutes’ notice. Funding streams were severed with the swipe of a pen. 

Even as a former Peace Corps volunteer, a serial NGO staffer, and someone who has taught in dirt-floor classrooms in towns plastered with USAID posters, I am acutely aware of how much I don’t know about where that money goes and how different programs operate. This is the ignorance Wurst is pushing back against. He tells me about one of his own first experiences in the field, and I’m floored.

“When I was on my first tour in Guatemala as a consular officer, I had a fellow officer who was not stuck in the visa section who felt sorry for me and asked if I wanted to go visit these homeless orphans who were living on the streets in Guatemala City. They were living in some of the roughest conditions that you can imagine. It’s really hard for me to describe how horrible their lives were and the conditions that they were in, and the poverty that they faced. Some of them were like half gone, you know, glazed eyes and runny noses. 

We went out all night, giving them food and shelter and following around this NGO that we had given a grant to. As they gave the kids food, they were also at the same time monitoring with a clipboard, like, Oh, where is so-and-so? Has anybody seen this kid for a while? And then they said, the kids are going to want to touch you. They’re not going to want to steal anything. They’re not taking anything from you. They absolutely have no physical affection in their lives. And they’re going to want to touch you, and they’re going to want to hug you, just like cats.” 

He goes on to describe the cable he wrote after that night. It wasn’t just a briefing on grant performance. It was a deeply human account of sorrow and need, and of the value in the smallest gestures of touch and presence. The cable, to his surprise, made its way through the chain of command and reached readers at the highest levels of government.

“And then my boss told me, ‘That was a beautiful cable. Don’t ever do that again.’”

With that, his story does exactly what his podcast is intended to do: it moves me. I steady myself because I know the well of moral reckoning he is reaching into. His story leads me into the dark corners of my own memory, as a teacher in refugee camps, remembering filtered light on mud-washed faces, small hands reaching for touch and attention. I am passing out rice to mothers in the Middle East, planting trees in a food desert in Haiti. His story brought all these experiences back to life for me, which is exactly the point. To remind us we are all connected. To remind us to be more like trees.

It is so profoundly obvious to me that these moments do not make millionaires or startup founders. They make teachers. Aid workers. Citizens who quietly hold up the scaffolding of civil society. And I am someone who deeply believes the world needs people like this. So is Wurst. Which is why his podcast is not just timely, but essential for the survival not just of foreign aid, but for creating the type of people who believe in and accomplish that aid. Programs like the Peace Corps and USAID don’t just export help; they import perspective. They shape citizens who return home with humility, compassion, and a wider sense of responsibility. They give distant suffering faces and names.

Every Peace Corps volunteer gets it—you come home changed—grateful for tap water, washing machines, language, and opportunity. It doesn’t make you a hero. It reorients your center of gravity, making it harder, if not impossible, to turn away. Without that pull, we drift toward a worldview where the individual becomes the center of the universe and suffering orbits at a comfortable distance.

“I think there was a lesson in that,” Wurst says, about the cable he wrote in Guatemala. “You don’t have to be who you’re told to be. You can bring yourself into the work. My whole career after that was about stretching the boundaries as far as I could.” 

In SoftPower/FulStories, those boundary-stretchers step forward one by one. There is the volunteer who helped write a dissent cable at USAID headquarters. The Mormon woman in Hungary laughing through a story about a condom water-balloon fight in a clinic. Stories of heartbreak, missteps, and celebration.

There is no script. No hero complex. Each episode begins and ends in the United States, but the heart—the growth ring, if you will—forms abroad. The humility is striking. And yet the collective accomplishments of the voices Wurst amplifies make it impossible to imagine a world without these programs. That world, however, is fast approaching. 

I ask Wurst what the world looks like without USAID, without fully staffed diplomacy, without, maybe someday, the Peace Corps.

“Some of it is flat-out life and death,” he says. “The increased mortality isn’t just in Africa—it’s everywhere. It’s impossible to sugarcoat that. You don’t always know the impact, but it accumulates. It becomes part of something bigger. Something rooted.” 

Indeed, recent models published in The New Yorker estimate more than 600,000 deaths already tied to foreign aid shutdowns, two-thirds of them children. And the true toll may never be known, because the systems that once tracked it are gone too.

Before we part, I ask Wurst, are you as hopeless as the rest of us? He placates me, “I will continue hoping. I will post things that are inspiring. In the beginning, [the podcast] was a reaction. It was a bleak time. It’s not going to get better anytime soon. I will continue to put out stories that make people feel good, but not pretend everything is ok.”

When we log off, I step outside to walk among the towering Butress trees outside my window. I agree with Wurst that not everything that matters can be measured. Art and storytelling have always helped humans make sense of the world. Foreign aid is no exception. It is impossible to listen to SoftPower/FulStories without feeling that something meaningful, something fragile, is being lost. 

With my eyes, I trace roots that bulge and sink into the riverbank, where they continue to grow. There is nothing in this world that is not tethered by some unbreakable cord to something else. I think of the magnolias, the oaks, the dogwoods planted around the White House—how they were tended, how fiercely they were protected in their earliest, most vulnerable years. Trees survive not through dominance but through cooperation, their roots tangled beneath our feet, trading the raw matter required to live.

No tree survives alone. Neither does a country.

Listen to the episodes here.