Matt Dawson

@ProjectGokuu @hubermanlab I mean come on. Does she not stop to question anything she reads in a study? “Ooo I found a study that says this, I’ll make a podcast!”. How are people listening to this stuff and taking it seriously?

Dr. Rhonda Patrick just dropped a 3-hour masterclass on the Huberman Lab podcast. She shared 8 shocking insights about everyday things that are slowly making you sick: 1) Drinking water from glass bottles (has higher levels of microplastics than in plastic ones)

@7Kiwi It never ceases to amaze me how much people who believe in “freedom and democracy” are anti anything that offers freedom and democracy because it’s a bit hard or don’t offer massive immediate profit

But it would create surplus electricity with no value on sunny summer days that will destabilise the grid and nothing at all on cold winter evenings when demand is highest.

@tomhfh This is becoming one weird obsession you have with GDP per capita.

"Over half of us think Britain is as rich as, or richer, than the United States." Mass delusion on an unprecedented scale. Or maybe half the country believes the US is stuck in 2008 too (it isn't).

@ZynxBTC A quick google tells me the net income for the USSR was at best 2.2:1, but why let that spoil the party

The UK has a far flatter income distribution than the Communist Soviet Union. The UK take home minimum wage for working a full time job (40-hours) is now £22,555. At £100k salary, the take home is £68,558. That is a net income ratio of 3.04:1 We are now at the point where the wage compression and taxes in the UK means that the difference between minimum wage and a top 5% salary is a net income difference of only ~3x. In the USSR using the same comparison, this figure never fell below 5:1 It's actually even worse in reality because the person earning £100k in the UK often has student loans. Britain is nominally capitalist but functionally communist. China is nominally communist but functionally capitalist. Funny how that works.

@Taylor__Myers @DrJStrategy Clearly not 🤣

@MattSDawson @DrJStrategy *they’re . Come on dawg your better than that.

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

@JibberJabber8 @DrJStrategy It’s Trump saying stuff in the moment. Those around him try to make it work. Countries don’t take him seriously. He rarely follows through, when he does it’s unplanned, chaotic. Leaders know he’s weak, predictably unpredictable, and will say something different next week.

@MattSDawson @DrJStrategy So what is your brilliant analysis on the choice to let others protect the strait? Please enlighten us.

@LoftusSteve This is bonkers. What’s the point in saving your money in a private/company pension. We should remove the state pension gradually and give every new born child, for example, 10k in a pension pot when born. They can access at 65 and top up as the wish

A super easy place to start with pension reform. If you get a public sector pension above £20,000 per annum you lose your state pension. This is easy for the Gov to track and should be phased in gradually so it's £20k for 2040.

@catexas62 @MsMelChen The irony of the tweet is what’s killing me 🤣

@MattSDawson @MsMelChen Wow ya’ll really got your head up your asses real good!!! Wokeness kills!

Let’s be real here. Europe has spent decades freeloading on American security. Even now, with every NATO member finally hitting the 2% GDP target in 2025. But beyond the financial contributions, the real rupture is philosophical and the Iran crisis has shown a spotlight on it. Europe worships process. Endless committees, consultations, and “predictability.” Macron actually calls it a virtue. For Trump, this is paralysis as his style is to articulate a threat, fix a target, and act. The Americans are men of conviction and purpose. Europe on the other hand lives by bureaucratic liturgy and in high-minded abstractions. Sure, Americans might make mistakes when acting. But Europe never considers what the costs of not acting actually are. Just look at how their nations are doing on various fronts, especially on the border crisis, and you see the same cancerous rot that undergirds their foreign policy approach play out domestically. It's the same problem on a different scale. Iran is currently holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage, choking 20% of global oil and spiking prices past $100 a barrel. Meanwhile, the regime is bleeding from strikes, its nuclear ambitions are still alive despite degraded capability, and its proxies are firing missiles at allies and oil tankers. If this isn’t a clear and present danger to the global economy - of which Europe is a part - then I don’t know what is. Yet when Washington asked to use European bases to finish the job - bases the US has defended for generations, the response was hesitation and hand-wringing. The US did strike from RAF Fairford, but only after warnings that British soil could become a “legitimate target.” If you cannot agree that a theocratic regime with eschatological ambitions who have shown no restraint in hitting out at Gulf countries and threatening the world’s energy jugular is an enemy worth confronting, then what, exactly, are we allies about? Europe loves to preen about being tough on Russia. They issue condemnations and speeches and slap sanctions that hardly work to cripple the Russian economy. Now here was a chance to do something concrete: let the Americans use the bases they already pay for, help clear the Strait, and actually degrade the Iranian war machine that arms Moscow’s proxies. Turmp didn’t ask for boots on the ground or any kind of more offensive action. All he wanted was permission to operate from the infrastructure America has underwritten for decades. They couldn’t even manage that. So can you blame the Americans for seeing NATO for what it is? A paper-tiger alliance that expects Washington to bleed and pay while Brussels and London convenes and deliberates. If Europe refuses to treat Iran as the threat it is while happily letting American power keep the Strait open and the lights on, then the alliance is already dead. Trump is simply stating the obvious and the Americans are becoming very reluctant to subsidize the European delusion any longer.

@JamesMelville Funny, I watched this and thought thank god we’re moving to a future of renewables because being stuck in oil and gas reliance is killing us. Can do it now or pass the problem to our children

Here’s Ed Conway completely destroying Ed Miliband’s net zero zealotry in banning new oil and gas licenses in the North Sea.

@parsi1414 @ukilaw Actually it goes back to the CIA-orchestrated 1953 coup (Operation Ajax) that overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh, and solidified the view that the Shah was a Western puppet, eventually leading to the Islamic revolution. Accidentally missed that but didn’t you

@ukilaw Thanks mate 🫡🙏🏼

The riddle I’ll never be able to solve: How did the UK, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Canada and Australia collectively decide that confronting the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism, soon-to-be nuclear Ayatollah, sitting astride the global energy chokepoint, is simply “not their war”? How did the memory, experience, philosophy and logic of a millennium of Western civilisation simply vanish? Is TDS really that deadly a mental disease? Can anyone help decipher this puzzle?

@tomhyde_ Tell me you’re deluded without telling me you’re deluded

No. That was the decision to vote for Brexit and then to capitalise on precisely zero of its benefits (political sovereignty, economic freedom); instead retaining a zombie membership in some spiteful attempt to spoil the prospect.

@GivnerAriel It’s not disgusting. It’s a perfectly understandable outcome given what we know from the science and what the aims of these companies are. Just because you don’t agree doesn’t make it ‘disgusting’.

This is disgusting and I can’t wait for the appeals. The precedent set by YouTube being liable for screen-time addiction is kind of scary. Treating algorithms like a defective product opens the door to endless lawsuits over “addictive” tech. What’s next? Books, video games, junk food? What happened to personal responsibility?

@RogerSeheult Did you read it? It says there’s legitimate science being explored but inconclusive. It’s still ‘woo woo’ until there’s proper replicated evidence, and for this we must wait. Or push it on people to make a quick buck…

The is one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world now acknowledging the benefits of long wavelength light (red or infrared light) therapy and the fact that we are indoors more now than ever before. For those that have had to endure scorn from fellow clinicians when talking about the benefits, this is validation. For those who still think this is woo woo, open a journal and your mind and realize that the world is passing you by. This is now the science!

@paulsaladinomd Everyone doesn’t agree. Depends hugely on the oil. Stop talking nonsense because you’ve got things to sell.

Regardless of your position on "seed oils," everyone agrees that heated seed oils are horrible for humans. 70-90% of seed oils are consumed after they have been heated (frier oil, oils used in cooking, etc.). Let that sink in. Stop eating engine lubricant.

@Landeur OMG what an absolutely astounding surprise it is to find out that this study does not exist and has been made up by the morons on social media.

In theory, these are the smartest people in Europe (sceptical). They're who we should like to see having large families with 5/6 children. Instead, welfare dependents, with IQs often below 100, have as many children as they can get benefits for. Civilisation ending stuff.

@afneil @afneil performing the kind of opinion u-turn that Starmer would be proud of

That Trump started the attacks on Iran without even having the semblance of a plan to keep the Strait of Hormuz open is both a mystery and a scandal — from which he might not recover politically. Republican grandees in swing seats/states now beginning to panic, flooding White House with calls to ‘do something’ as gas [petrol] prices soar.

@kevinroose This is nonsense and poorly thought out. The fact AI is rewriting makes it an unfair test because the original thought and creativity is human. You need either both human and AI rewrite human, or AI rewrite human and human rewrite AI. And it needs to be blind to you

We made a blind taste test to see whether NYT readers prefer human writing or AI writing. 86,000 people have taken it so far, and the results are fascinating. Overall, 54% of quiz-takers prefer AI. A real moment! nytimes.com/interactive/20…

@minzlicht AI helped people realise that they intuitively appreciate that things they read/watch took some form of human effort, skill, creativity. AI removes that and so kills motivation to look at AI creations. For example, I have no desire to look at your infographic knowing it’s AI

Ask a colleague why they refuse to use AI. They say it uses up all that water. You point out the water use is far smaller than some would have them believe. Then it's the hallucinations. You mention accuracy has improved dramatically. Then, finally: the process is the point. The struggle. The craft. The deeply human act of sitting with uncertainty. They're not reasoning. They're rationalizing their gut intuitions. My amazing student @vicoldemburgo, with Éloïse Côté, Reem Ayad, @yorl, Jason Plaks and I have a new preprint that explores this more thoroughly, called "The Moralization of Artificial Intelligence". We started by asking how moralized AI has become in public discourse. Analyzing 69,890 news headlines from 2018 to 2024, we found that AI was moralized at levels comparable to GMOs and vaccines, technologies whose moral opposition has been studied for decades. It ranked above both. The sharpest spike came within weeks of ChatGPT's launch in late 2022. When we surveyed representative samples of Americans, a majority of AI opponents said their views wouldn't change even if AI proved safe and beneficial. That's consequence insensitivity, the hallmark of moral conviction, not practical calculation. Across art, chatbots, legal tools, and romantic companions, AI moralization loaded onto a single latent factor. A global moral stance, dressed up in whatever practical language is available. The behavioral data make this concrete: a one standard deviation increase in moralization scores predicted a 42% drop in actual AI usage, even when it would have benefited that person personally. The conviction preceded the behavior by up to 573 days. The next time someone gives you three different reasons to oppose AI, each one dissolving under mild scrutiny, you're probably not watching someone think. You're watching someone feel. Preprint avaulable here: osf.io/preprints/psya…