Hidden Forces

I'm joined by @WillManidis to discuss the collapse of secular institutional legitimacy, the reassertion of divine faith and political violence as organizing forces, and what AI-generated wealth concentration means for the economy and the social contract. hiddenforces.io/podcasts/god-a…

I've always felt that Trump was a two-dimensional thinker. His success has come largely from his ability to exploit behavioral norms and from his lack of inhibition, including his use of strategic irrationality. Up until now, he's operated in a world of laws, norms, and rational expectations, banking on his counterparties' commitments to the status quo and their willingness to de-escalate. What he did by assassinating Iran's leader alongside members of his immediate family at the war's outset and by continuously acting in bad faith during the course of negotiations has been to change the underlying conditions of the game. He does not seem to recognize that. He certainly hasn't adjusted his behavior accordingly, but it seems that the Iranians have. What worries me is that this behavior will eventually have the same impact on Chinese calculations, whether through spillover from the current conflict or in some future confrontation. While the world can weather prolonged disruptions to the global economy stemming from the constriction of traffic in the strait, a set of similar strategic miscalculations vis-à-vis China could lead to the most catastrophic war the world has ever seen.

I'm joined by @ThematicMarkets to discuss the ongoing US-Israeli military campaign against Iran and its implications for the global economy, global security, and the future of American power. We open with ... 👇🏼 hiddenforces.io/podcasts/why-a…

Curious about @ThematicMarkets' research? Here's a great opportunity to taste the cooking with one of the best interviewers in the business, @kofinas! The 1st hour is free & if you like it, you can subscribe to both @HiddenForcesPod & @ThematicMarkets!

Much of what is in this video contains memories that could easily be described as traumatizing to the generations that lived through them. In some cases, these events aren't even a year old. Were we living in ancient Athens, whoever made it would have been fined into bankruptcy.

You are confusing morals with interests. The reason I did not voice strong views on Israel's destruction of Gaza was both because I have long sympathized with Israel's security dilemmas and because the effects were isolated and America's complicity was minimal. I don't insert myself in foreign conflicts like those between the Israelis and Palestinians, which have a long and storied history of mutual bloodshed and enmity. But the idea that I would not be permitted to have a view on whether or not the United States should allow the Israelis to undermine a ceasefire, without which a resolution of this destructive escalatory dynamic in the Gulf would be impossible is insulting. The United States is a global empire and it is waging war against Iran that is not in the national interest, primarily because it seems to be in the President's interests, in the interests of Netanyahu (who cannot afford to forgo a permanent war footing), for zealots within his coalition who have expansionary ambitions within their near abroad, and in the interests of certain contractors and firms within the national security and defense space. Tel Aviv had done a masterful job slowly boiling the Islamic Republic, the IRGC, and its proxies over the last two years. Absolutely MASTERFUL. They sowed dissent, distrust, and paranoia among its ranks and had severely degraded Iran's military and unconventional force projection capabilities in the greater middle east. Combined with recent protests, the ongoing pressure of sanctions, and the desire of many regional states to move into a future of peace and stability, the Islamic Republic was on the clock. The smart thing would have been to continue to test and poke and prod, slowly cooking the regime in its own enzymes. Instead, this reckless coalition of right-wing fanatics in Israel and a President who became drunk on fantasies of rapidly decapitating and colonizing Iran decided to roll the dice on a poorly thought out misadventure which has turned into a strategic defeat for America and risks turning into a bigger one for Israel. Netanyahu did not act in Israel's best interests. He acted in his own. To the extent that this could have been in Israel's interests, it would have required the US to become bogged down with it in the region. That was also a roll of the dice. It's ok that you don't see this. What is a shame is that you perceive my views as intolerable. So intolerable, that you would need to block me. And the irony of all this is that you were probably a listener, in part, because you liked my analysis of the US and Israel's strategic victories since October 7th. Now that the same analytic framework leads to a stinging rebuke of that policy, you block me. Common brother... Anyway...I want to leave this conversation on a more constructive note, which is that while I never enjoy arguing with or turning away listeners of the podcast, I do appreciate that you were a listener and that the show was able to add value to your life and your thought processes for as long as it did. I wish you the best, and I hope that things take a turn for the better, as I've seen more death and destruction in the last four years than I can continue to bear and covering it weighs on my heart.

@kofinas As I said, I subscribed for your macro opinion, not your take on Israel's moral question. You have moved beyond that: all good. I'm moving on now as well.

The argument that we should not retweet images or videos of Israeli bombings in Beirut without simultaneously doing this for every other conflict zone in the world omits the obvious fact that we are not directly implicated in every other conflict. Our misadventure in Iran is turning into a strategic defeat for the United States that could rival or exceed that of Iraq in 2003. Are we supposed to pretend that this isn't happening? Are we supposed to shut our eyes and mouths to further escalations under a leadership that appears both corrupt and frighteningly in over its head? This reminds me of the early days of Covid. Not only are we staring at a slow motion train wreck, but there's also a social pressure to keep one's mouth shut lest one run the risk of being labeled or personally attacked.

I identified a set of attributes that when taken together made this presidency unprecedented. (whole ≠ component) You chose to focus on one of the variables and then try and make the comparison along that specific line. My response was that I was not drawing that comparison but you continue to want to make that argument, which is a narrow argument that I never tried to make. That's like me saying "No one has ever made a better burger" and you responding with "there have been better tomatoes on other burgers." It doesn't feeling like you are gaslighting me but that you are genuinely stuck which is why I'm calling it autistic.

@kofinas @LarryHCummers @NickSzabo4 I’m out man. This is not a good faith discussion. You’re right! You’re right about it all and always were!

@TotemMacro I can't respond to your tweets, because @NickSzabo4 has disabled my ability to respond, which I didn't even know was possible and is incredibly pathetic. Bottom line: Almost every American with a public school education knows that FDR and Wilson campaigned on keeping us out of a war that we eventually ended up participating in. That does not mean that this president and this presidency is comparable to those. That's autism-level analysis.

I'm joined on @HiddenForcesPod by @Rory_Johnston to discuss the economic consequences of this open-ended war in the Gulf and the most plausible scenarios for energy markets and the global economy. Hint: The scenarios range from bad to really, REALLY bad. hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-l…

I'm joined by @johnkonrad — one of the most influential voices in commercial shipping — who argues that Trump has a maritime strategy to exploit the ongoing disruption of commercial shipping with a political endgame that few in the media are discussing. hiddenforces.io/podcasts/why-t…

We are living through a generational reordering of the global economy away from free trade and open capital markets toward one increasingly shaped by national interests, clandestine statecraft, and great power competition operating below the threshold of open military conflict.

This was one of many insightful anecdotes from @scmallaby’s book. His appearance on Hidden Forces publishes tomorrow morning at 3 AM EST.

This is brilliant book and easily bests '1929' as must read @B_Eichengreen Listen to his @HiddenForcesPod interview @kofinas

I'm joined by @TheEconomist's @glcarlstrom to discuss the mood across the Gulf since the US and Israeli began bombing Iran on February 28th, and what the conflict's trajectory reveals about the widening gap between tactical success and strategic victory. hiddenforces.io/podcasts/why-t…

I'm joined by @Jacob__Siegel to discuss the rise of what he calls "The Information State", a new form of political regime that governs not through force or democratic consent, but by controlling the codes and protocols of the digital world. hiddenforces.io/podcasts/infor…

"There's a RAND strategy document from 1996 saying that the Internet is going to efface boundaries between   nations and break the distinctions between military and civilian activity. All of these things have happened. The failure was to not fortify the nation state against the effects of the technology and to not discipline the technology so that it didn't undermine our political systems. Why did this occur? Why is a global communications architecture incompatible with national citizenship or national sovereignty? Well, here's one obvious example: if you are participating in a public debate relevant to things going on in your life, which have to do with the particular political community that you belong to, and I can enter into that conversation uninvited from another country and manipulate it deliberately or distort it through my participation by impersonating a citizen without being one, it devalues the very meaning of that citizenship. Citizenship requires a boundary that is policed in order to be meaningful. When you wipe away that boundary, the category of citizen itself loses its value. I think this is what we've seen happen." Excerpt from my recent conversation with @Jacob__Siegel on @HiddenForcesPod. The episode drops tomorrow morning @ 3 AM EST.

I'm joined by @HamidRezaAz to discuss how the US and Israeli military campaign against Iran has evolved over its first three weeks and what its trajectory reveals about the competing strategic objectives driving the conflict. We open with ... 🧵👇🏼 hiddenforces.io/podcasts/iran-…

It was a pleasure to join @kofinas on his podcast @HiddenForcesPod to discuss the military, political, and social dimensions of the #Iran war hiddenforces.io/podcasts/iran-…

Eichengreen's timing couldn't be better. The subject — the history of the world's dominant currencies — arrives right on cue, filling a large void in the contemporary literature that has been conspicuously missing. His appearance on @HiddenForcesPod drops tomorrow. 🤓💪🏼

While I think we are understandably focused on the risks of what appears, on its face, to be a calamity in the making, let’s consider for a moment the possibility that Trump is smarter and less reckless than he appears, and that perhaps, we will look back in a few years (or more) and realize that what he did during his terms was to reset the entire game board on terms more favorable to the United States. The rules-based order was dead, like the zombie banks in Japan, but we kept propping it up because of institutional inertia, because nobody wanted to rock the boat, and because we just didn’t know what else to do. Well, Trump DGAF. He’s been willing to slaughter sacred cows, break taboos, and punch the reset button repeatedly until a new equilibrium is reached that positions the United States for the world as it is, and not as we wish it were or have been pretending it is for the last 15 years or more.

Demetri is such a good interviewer I am really happy how this turned out. Do listen if you want to know my thoughts on the war and on Iran