Hidden Forces

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

I'm joined on @HiddenForcesPod by former Portuguese Minister of European Affairs @MacaesBruno to discuss what the Iran War reveals about the Trump administration's strategic logic and why it may prove to be the most expansive American war of the century. hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-l…

I'm joined by @joshua_landis for this timely episode about the escalating war with Iran, the limits of American power, and why the absence of a clear theory of victory raises the specter of yet another catastrophic regime-change war in the Middle East. hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-i…

I'm surprised at comparisons being made between the US bombing of Iran in 2026 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Besides this being a bad comparison, the more obvious choice is Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which came almost 4 years to the day of this potential calamity. While the latter was a ground invasion, it was nonetheless rightly denounced as a war of aggression by the US and its allies. It was also a reckless military adventure that Putin seems to have single-mindedly pursued, with little to no consideration for its potential downside and a complete indifference for the reticence and confusion it caused among members of his own security council—his public intimidation and dressing down of a bumbling Sergei Naryshkin on the eve of war comes readily to mind. And yet, the Trump administration reserves for itself the right to unilaterally and preventively commence a decapitation strike against the leadership of a country of nearly 100 million people located over 6,000 miles from Washington, with no publicly communicated theory of victory and in direct violation of its own campaign promises. I have no idea if this will work out for the United States—I truly hope it does, as a nuclear-armed Iran would doubtlessly be a nightmare for anyone seeking peace and stability in the Greater Middle East. But what if it doesn't? What if this creates yet another open-ended conflict that further destabilizes and complicates the global security picture? And what of the precedent that it sets? And what is the view from Beijing? What does Xi think of all of this? Does it make him less willing to roll the dice in the South China Sea, because he perceives Trump as a madman? Perhaps this is partly Trump's objective...or maybe the cherry on his sundae. But what if it serves to undermine confidence in the United States, in the competence of its leadership, and in the stability of a world beholden to its leadership? What if we are becoming (or have become) the belligerent power whose specter we constantly invoke? We are in a new world, or maybe yet, a very old one that no one alive today can remember. I worry that things are spinning out of control faster than we can comprehend, and that before we know it, we’ll be staring at the pieces of a world we once cherished, trying to make sense of how it all came apart so quickly. I hope I’m wrong.

I'm joined by historian Arne Westad, who argues that the pre-WWI era of multipolarity, imperial decline, and great power rivalry offers a more instructive and alarming parallel to today than the Cold War—and what we must do to prevent a repeat of 1914. hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-c…

India doesn’t hold the same cards China does. It’s less integrated. Less export-dependent. More driven by domestic consumption. If Washington wants a counterweight to China, it is the only serious candidate. @SonyKapoor

Could AI extend US dominance for another decade? Maybe. But that assumes the rest of the world is standing still. It isn't. AI adoption is global. Talent is global. Capital is global. If productivity gains spread faster, America's edge narrows, it doesn't grow. @SonyKapoor

Moving supply chains from China to India sounds simple. @SonyKapoor why it isn't, why it doesn’t need to be, and why that's fine.

China’s success wasn’t just cheap labor. It was experimentation. India may have started 20–30 years late, but their catch-up is accelerating. @sonykapoor

Much of US outperformance over the last decade wasn’t just stocks - it was the rising USD. Now that hedging dollar exposure has become more expensive, foreigner investors are more aware of how concentrated they are in US assets and the risk of a sell-off is growing. @SonyKapoor

Everything about this clip—from the mutual confusion of guest and host to the attention hacking “I look like Howie Mandel from Little Monsters” guy being interviewed on the largest English media program in the world—suggests we still have a ways to go before we hit rock bottom.

Platforms aren’t just intermediaries, matching sellers with buyers. They are the gate keepers to entire worlds—controlling what gets amplified and suppressed, censored and promoted—and they've turned this into political power. @superwuster

I think "Propositional Tyranny" is a great way of putting it. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche argues that Socrates turned reason into a tyrant, using it as a weapon and elevating it over other instincts and passions. I remember being shocked when I first learned this. I'd grown up revering Socrates and was confused that someone as brilliant as Nietzsche seemed to value Aeschylus and Sophocles over Plato. As I've grown older, I've come to appreciate Nietzsche's observations about reality and truth. I've come to share his affection for the same poets whom Plato ceremonially banishes from his Republic. Both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein seem to have arrived at similar conclusions about the limitations of language and our limited ability to translate all of reality into propositional statements. This is the basis of much of my skepticism about "digital transcendence" and about translating consciousness into code that can run on silicon. It's basically just one giant hand-wave.

I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree with @RaoulGMI, as I'm unsure what he means by 'knowledge'. What does it mean to "know something"? Is AI a fountain of knowledge or an information processor with fundamental limitations in its ability to apprehend reality? Putting that aside, I think there is a critical distinction to be drawn between knowledge and understanding. The latter is something that cannot be outsourced. Let's assume for a moment that the price of knowledge goes to zero. What is the cost to each individual of assimilating that knowledge into understanding? I would say that it is as high today as it has ever been. Will it get cheaper? That depends on innovations in learning, and while I can imagine what this might look like from a science-fiction standpoint, I don't see any evidence that we are on the cusp of a learning revolution of that kind that would equate knowledge with understanding. Let me also point out one more kink in the armor, and that has to do with the concept of ‘wisdom’. Even if we managed to strap people into chairs and jack them into a kung-fu training program, will they gain wisdom overnight? And what is wisdom anyway? Can it be obtained without experience, or can that experience be compressed in the same theoretical way that all those martial arts mix tapes were compressed and uploaded into Neo's brain so that he can learn not just how to fight, but when to fight? Maybe, but now we've really ventured far afield into the world of sci-fi thought experiments. AI does certainly feel like a magic box, and using it to help me learn has been exhilarating. It’s like having a thought partner that never gets tired, doesn’t mind being interrogated, questioned ad nauseam, or interrupted, and never, ever complains. But what I’ve noticed is that people are increasingly using it as though it were a truth machine, abstracting away the epistemological and empirical processes of fact-finding and the hard work of converging on truth that people have been refining since the Enlightenment. And then there’s all the “right-brain stuff” that McGilchrist talks about, which we’ve been neglecting for much longer, and which AI is entirely blind to. Or is it? Are neural nets immune to the logical paradoxes that arise from a reliance on formal systems of knowledge once sensors mounted on robots begin gathering data from the physical world? Or is true knowledge, ontological knowledge—knowledge of the world as it is—a derivative of processes which cannot be formalized? The fact is, we just don’t know, and because EVERYTHING we think we understand about the world and that we recognize in AI is mediated by our brains, we can never be sure. That leaves us with what I believe is the only real form of understanding: revelation. Those who have experienced this for themselves know what I’m talking about. This is the “download” to Neo’s “upload.” It is the experience of having an entire world illuminated all at once, without ever having had to learn a single atomized bit of information for yourself. This is not the same thing as an epiphany, which is a discontinuous change in one’s understanding brought on by the accretive accumulation of knowledge. This is different. So, where does this leave us? Yes, AI may be a magic box of knowledge for the left-brain, but for most people its use will result in the atrophying of both hemispheres...and they will still need to 'learn', which means that those who have assimilated that knowledge into understanding will be uniquely positioned to excel in this new world... ...because understanding comes at a cost, even if the cost of knowledge goes to zero. Whenever young people reach out to me for advice on what to study, I tell them that if I were starting a liberal arts degree today, I’d major in philosophy (with a focus on epistemology and ethics) and history. One teaches you how to think, and the other gives you a data set that your narrative-hungry mind can interpret, analyze, and incorporate in the service of deepening your understanding of the world...but only the world as we’ve constructed it in our minds. For anything deeper, you need to open yourself to the mystery of existence, and that is a different matter entirely.

We are living in an age of abundance where content is infinite, but time is still scarce. Are we reaching a breaking point in the attention economy where people have become so overwhelmed by the onslaught of content and information that they begin to drop off? @superwuster

Social media didn’t just change media. It changed civilization. And the consequences - polarization, distrust, fragmentation - are available everywhere for all to see. @superwuster