Let's Know Things

This week we talk about Keir Starmer, Labour, and the Reform UK party. We also discuss Tories, the Lib Dems, and two-party systems. Recommended Book: Peak by K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool Transcript For more than 100 years, the British political system has been dominated by two parties: Labour and the Conservative Party, often called the Tories. In practice, that means these two parties, which are center-left and center-right in their leanings, respectively, have tended to shape the direction of British politics and the Overton Window of thinkable proposals—things that might actually happen because they get the requisite support from politicians and the public. These two parties have usually had to work with other, smaller parties in order to get anything done, because the UK has a parliamentary system that often leaves the party with the most representatives lacking enough support to run a functioning government, solo. As a consequence, the Liberal Democrats, which is a fairly centrist party, the Green Party, which focuses on environmentalism and more left-wing concerns, Plaid Cymru (plied KUM-ree), which is the Welsh nationalist party, and the Scottish National Party, which is exactly what it sounds like, have long influenced Labour and the Tories, aligning their votes with whomever gives them a seat at the table. This has given some influence to smaller groups that might otherwise lack representation, though that influence has typically been moderate to meager, at best—the folks in Labour and the Conservative party have run things in the UK, and that’s been the case for generations. Things started to shake up a bit in the 20-teens, however, when anti-immigration and EU-skepticism in Britain led to the creation of the far-right Brexit Party, which was co-founded by politician Nigel Farage, who was the leader of the UK Independence Party in the early 2000s and 20-teens, and who was previously a Tory, and Catherine Blaiklock, a politician and hotelier who stepped down from her position as party leader the year after the Brexit Party was founded after anti-Islamic and racist comments she’d previously made online were rediscovered. The Brexit Party existed, almost exclusively, to push for a no-agreement exit from the European Union by the UK, which was considered to be a fairly fringe ideology back then, but which gained a lot of steam as other populists began to add their support to the general concept. Both the government and the existing political structure of the UK was then caught flat-footed, by all indications very surprised by the eventual success of that push, and the UK left the EU on January 31, 2020, after a whole lot of skepticism that it would ever happen, even after a vote in favor of Brexit took place. This represented a serious come to Jesus moment for British politicians, but also British society, and there’s been quite a lot of self-reflection and naval gazing in the years since, as the Brexit pullout from the EU has caused quite a lot of economic and diplomatic damage, while also shining a spotlight on numerous simmering issues that were previously overlooked or unaddressed, including the bubbling resentment and at times outright xenophobia felt by a significant portion of the British electorate, and persistent economic issues faced by folks at the middle and lower rungs of society. What I’d like to talk about today is the recent 2026 UK Local Elections, and what they seem to tell us about how things are going in British politics, and what they portend for the current Labour-run administration. — On May 7, 2026, the UK held local elections for 5,066 councillors, 136 local authorities, and six directly elected mayors. Some of these elections were postponed in 2025 to allow for government restructuring, but most of these positions were last up for election in 2022. This election was generally seen as an unofficial referendum on the governing Labour Party, and in particular the current Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, who has been in office for just under two years, and who stepped into the role of PM after the role was held by the Conservative Tories for 14 years; five different Prime Ministers taking the reins during that period, including David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak. All that changing in leadership is indicative of the chaos the UK government was experiencing at the time, the May 2010 general election leading to a period of significant austerity—the government cutting tons of social programs in order to reduce spending—which then fed into more support for Brexit when some members of the party positioned the economic issues people were facing as the consequence of EU-related immigration, and shortly thereafter, the world succumbed to the Covid-19 pandemic. There was a lot of truly significant political change from about 2010 onward, then, and a lot for the general population to be upset about. The Conservatives held onto power despite it all for those 14 years, but the shift back to Labour was the result of Starmer and his party saying, listen, we hear you, a lot has to change, and we can instigate that change. Trust us. This new election suggests that the majority of voters in the UK feel that the Labour Party hasn’t lived up to that trust. In Wales, Plaid Cymru has taken the most seats, 43, but failed to achieve the 49 seat majority they would require to govern, solo. In Scotland, the SNP took the most seats, but also fell short of a majority, netting 58 seats, not the 65 required for a majority. Both of those results are not terribly shocking, though in Wales Labour lost a lot of power, down 35 seats and holding onto just 9. The Conservatives also lost in Wales, holding onto seven seats and losing 22. In Scotland, too, Labor lost some of their influence, losing 4 seats and retaining 17, while the Conservatives lost a whopping 19 seats, holding onto just 12. In England, the change in seat allocation was stunning, though. Labour lost 1406 seats, leaving them with 997, while the Conservatives lost 557 seats, holding onto just 773. Even considering those losses, the biggest story in England is the surge in support for previously small parties, in particular a far-right party called Reform UK, previously called the Brexit Party, and run by the aforementioned proponent of the British exit from the EU, Nigel Farage. Reform UK went from 2 seats to 1,444; a shocking outcome, and one that makes them the biggest winner in this election, by far. They also gained 17 seats, up from zero, in Scotland, putting them at an equal level there with Labour, and they went from zero to 34 in Wales, putting them in a competitive second place after Plaid Cymru, which again, claimed 43 seats. Other, non-Labour, non-Conservative parties also gained seats in this election, though not at the level of Reform UK. The Green Party gained two seats in Wales and six in Scotland, bringing them up to 15 there. They also gained 374 sets in England, bringing them up to 515 total seats, which leaves them in fifth place, but just 258 seats shy of the Conservatives. The Lib Dems, which are the local Centrist party, gained 151 seats, putting them in third. And there was a small surge in independent politicians winning elections, as well, that group now controlling 199 seats, up from 27 before this vote. In the wake of this absolute shellacking of Keir Starmer’s Labour party—which again, lost 1406 seats in England, and their opposition, and in many ways their polar opposite, the far-right Reform UK party, gained even more than Labour lost, up 1442 seats—in the wake of that, Starmer has been asked to resign, and as of the day I’m recording this, at least, he’s saying that he will not resign, and since there’s no formal challenge to his leadership, he can stay in power if he chooses. There is a growing movement amongst Labour lawmakers to ask him to set a timetable for stepping down, however, and there’s a pretty good chance that will happen, as the British political system allows parties to change their Prime Minister mid-term without requiring a new election, so they could swap him out for someone else, making him the face of this immense electoral failure, then they could try to change course before the next election, which will happen by mid-August of 2029, during which the vote will be for the 650 seats in the House of Commons, which is currently dominated by Starmer’s Labour party. The big takeaway here, from political analysts at least, is that what used to be a reliably two-party system, for over a century that’s been the case, is now a five-way race within a cultural context in which voters seem to be a lot less loyal to politicians and parties, and in which a whole lot of previously reliable infrastructure, social systems, and cultural expectations have been recently disrupted. People in the UK seem to be generally unhappy about all sorts of things, and that kind of broad unhappiness often results in more populism, which means general anti-establishment stances and us-versus-them ideologies, including racial, religious, and nationalistic versions of such ideologies, and typically a lot more support for charismatic leadership over leaders who are generally qualified and will probably be good at their jobs because they’re experienced and knowledgeable. In other words, you’re more likely to get loudmouths and celebrities running for office, successfully, in populist electoral contexts, and you’re also more likely to see parties leaning into superficial race, class, and elite-vs-everyman issues, as opposed to running on well-defined approaches to dealing with more complex issues. In the meantime, until that 2029 election, it’s likely Farage’s Reform UK will bang the drum against the governing Labour party to gather more power in the lead up to 2029, and that other non-Labour, non-Conservative parties will attempt to do the same, newly energized by these results. And depending on how that non-voting-year rallying goes, this could represent a foot in the door for these smaller parties. And we could consequently see more former Labour and Conservative politicians and voters leaving for Reform, for the Lib Dems, for the Greens, and for independents. All of which will make UK politics a lot more chaotic, but also probably more diverse, with power less centralized and the government’s makeup a bit less predictable. Show Notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_Kingdom_local_elections https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/world/europe/uk-elections-local-takeaways.html https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/05/08/world/uk-local-elections-results https://apnews.com/article/uk-elections-starmer-labour-what-to-know-eb11ff39b1b74bbaf9f4ef6abfd60f64 https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/08/uk/uk-local-election-reform-farage-starmer-intl https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-08/how-bad-for-labour-britain-s-local-elections-in-six-charts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_United_Kingdom https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c1428pev1n0t#election-englan https://www.politico.eu/article/nigel-farage-reform-uk-win-next-general-election/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_United_Kingdom_general_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Blaiklock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_UK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Farage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about industrialization, antibiotics, and child mortality rates. We also discuss corruption, instability, and progress. Recommended Book: Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio Transcript Demographic transition is a social sciences theory that posits, based on all sorts of modern historical data, that societies tend to change, demographically, as they transition from a largely agrarian, low-industrial society, to that of a less-agrarian, high-industrial society. Most modern, post-hunter-gatherer societies have started out plowing the vast majority of their labor into bare subsistence, human beings spending their days, throughout their whole lives, working the land in order to produce enough food to live. All sorts of social and economic systems arose around this base-level fact, including those that tied laborers to the land, allowing for the rise of a leadership or ruling class, regional militaries, and other sorts of specialists. But until relatively recent history, the majority of people in a given society labored to produce raw essentials, and that was just the shape of things. This began to change with the dawn of the industrial revolution, and in some areas a bit before that, as precursor technologies allowed societies to produce more food and other essentials with less manual labor and using fewer foundational resources, like land. These technologies, as they became more widely distributed, more effective and efficient, and cheaper to deploy and operate, allowed more people to do more sorts of things, leading to a ballooning of industry and commerce in industrializing regions, and that allowed said regions to invest in other things, including medical knowledge, education, and so on. Life wasn’t exactly a cakewalk in these industrializing areas, and all sorts of new abuses and issues, including long hours at factories and problems related to pollution, arose and became common. But because these sorts of societies required professionals with new types of knowledge and know-how, and because they were able to sustain an increasing number of specialities beyond working the land to generate food and other bare necessities, keeping people alive, longer, and ensuring more people had the specialized knowledge required to do all those things, became more of a priority, and one that could actually be addressed because of the concomitant ability to feed and clothe and house and address more of the needs of more people. There were gobs of other spiraling forces in the mix, of course, including religion, politics, and so on, but that general tendency to shift away from raw subsistence into more complex and diverse economic systems was a driving factor behind a lot of what happened from around 1800 until, well, now. What I’d like to talk about today is a specific data point, or collection of data points, that arguably, more than any other such data points, show the benefits of the industrialized, modern society we’re living in, today, despite all the accompanying downsides. — So most societies, at this point, have undergone significant changes as a result of our widespread application of technologies that allow human beings to get more done with the same amount of effort. We’re able to generate more value, of all kinds, than our ancestors, and though it’s possible to criticize the change in priorities and focus on all the negative knock-on effects of these changes—and there are many such negative knock-on effects, like large-scale military conflicts and rampant pollution and climate change—it would be difficult to argue that there haven’t been some fairly significant upsides for humanity, as well. One key upside is related to that demographic transition I mentioned. As societies shift and it becomes better for everyone if more people know how to do more things, and it thus becomes a priority for more people to live long enough to use the knowledge and know-how they acquire, it has increasingly made more sense for governments to invest in our overall longevity and survivability. We can’t just say, I’d like everyone to live longer, and then snap our fingers and make that happen. But we can, and have, invested in technologies and systems that make longer lives more likely, and from 1800 onward that’s generally been the trend, with a huge upswing arriving in the mid-20th century, when a bunch of new tools and technologies, including things like modern antiseptics and early antibiotics, first arrived on the scene, dramatically reducing the mortality rate associated with all kinds of medical procedures. Arguably the most significant social gain during this period, though, has been the bogglingly large reduction in child mortality rates. Child mortality refers to the death of children under the age of five, and this figure is, today, usually expressed as the likelihood of a child under five dying, per 1000 children in an area. So you might say in India, the child death rate is 92 in 1000, which means 92 of every 1000 children resulting from live births in India die before they reach the age of five. And that was actually the real child mortality rate in India back in the year 2000. And the story of overall global child mortality rates is actually pretty well exemplified in India’s rates, as the country has seen a dramatic drop in all-cause child deaths in recent decades. In the year 2000, as I mentioned, it was expected that 92 out of every 1000 children would die before the age of 5 in India. As of 2024, though, that number has dropped to just 32 out of every 1000; a 68% drop. If you go back as far as 1990, the progress is even more impressive, those 2024 numbers representing a 76% drop in child mortality. This progress has largely been the consequence of intentional, targeted health interventions by the Indian government, including institutionalized child delivery services and widespread, well-funded immunization efforts that ensured more children got vaccines and other sorts of care that was previously lacking, or which was not widely disseminated beyond wealthy families. They’ve also invested in newborn care and neonatal units at hospitals, which has increased child survival outcomes in a large radius around these facilities. Southeast Asian nations still account for about 25% of all under-five deaths, globally, but improvements in India mirror those in China, which made rapid and sustained progress on this issue beginning in the 1950s, but really hitting their stride in the 1970s, when their child mortality rate was 143 per 1000 children; that rate dropped to just 12 per 1000 by 2020. Globally, right now, the average child mortality rate is just under 40 per 1000, which is down from 93 per 1000 in 1990. That’s a staggering amount of progress, but it does mean that nearly 5 million children still die each year before their 5th birthday, which adds up to something like 15,000 of such deaths per day. At the moment, the vast majority of these deaths, about 80% of them, occur in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The cause of these deaths varies a bit based on location, and there’s a time component to this, too, as some areas have seen much higher rates due to epidemics, but most of the causes of child death before the age of 5 are consistent, with premature birth and pneumonia, birth asphyxia or trauma, malaria, diarrhea, congenital abnormalities, and sepsis representing about 60-70% of such deaths, globally. Almost all of these issues are preventable, and the major barrier to reducing these numbers further is access to resources and expertise that are more widely available and accessible in the wealthier world; there are huge disparities in child mortality between rich countries and poor countries, in other words, and while the number of child deaths has decreased everywhere, including in the world’s poorest countries, over the past 100 years, countries like Finland see about 2 in every 1000 children die before they reach the age of five, while countries like Niger see nearly 115 in every 1000 children die before the age of five. This figure was previously around 500 in every 1000, globally, so about half of all children would die before the age of five, even in relatively recent history, even in the wealthiest regions, just a few hundred years ago—so again, stunning progress in this area; and looking back, in addition to families needing more hands to work the fields, before everyone started industrializing, families would tend to have as many kids as they could because it was generally just assumed that about half of them would die within the first couple of years; some cultures still have traditions of not naming their children until they’ve lived for a few years because of that earlier child mortality trend. There’s still plenty to be done in this space, though, and the changes necessary to dramatically drop this mortality rate even further, regionally and globally, are not revolutionary in nature, it’s just a matter of more widely and equitably disseminating tools and technologies and cultural and economic infrastructure that already exists across much of the world, to the places where it doesn’t exist yet. That’s a tall order in some locations, though, as part of why some high child mortality rate regions still have those high rates is that they’ve also had persistent government instability, which has in turn led to persistent internal conflicts and government overthrows and long histories of grift and corruption at the top-most levels of society. In other words, it’s extremely difficult to improve these sorts of numbers when those who are in charge of a high-mortality-rate region are seemingly incapable of keeping things stable, and always seem to be enriching themselves at the expense the the country they’re meant to be governing. That’s a much larger systemic issue, of course, made up of numerous fractal issues that each have their own distinct causes and potential solutions. But the main takeaway here is that child mortality is already an immense success story of modernity, and even more progress is possible, but in order to achieve that kind of progress, a bunch of other problems will probably need to be solved in these still-highly-afflicted areas, first. And solving these problems will likely be a truly heavy lift, for anyone who tries to tackle them, until and unless something fundamental changes about governing norms and corruption, and the many forces that enable that kind of high-level corruption, globally. Show Notes https://data.unicef.org/resources/levels-and-trends-in-child-mortality-2025/ https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/un-report-highlights-indias-79-decline-in-child-mortality-rates-a-major-contributor-to-global-child-health-advancements/articleshow/129660557.cms https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_mortality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041851/china-all-time-child-mortality-rate/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7138028/ https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/topics/topic-details/GHO/child-mortality-and-causes-of-death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

This week we talk about the Strait of Hormuz, oil, and Russia. We also discuss Patriot missiles, expensive weapons, and peer rivals. Recommended Book: Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff Transcript During 2025 and early 2026, about 20 million barrels of crude oil and other petroleum products was shipped through the Strait of Hormuz every day. That’s about a quarter of the world’s total seaborne oil, and essentially all of that oil, and gas, and those other energy products that pass through this strait are from Middle Eastern suppliers like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and Iran. Beginning at the tail-end of February 2026, however, the Iranian military has shut down the Strait by threatening to take out or capture any vessels that attempt to pass through it. This has had the practical effect of initially reducing tanker traffic through the Strait by about 70%, but in recent weeks traffic has dropped to nearly zero. As of April 2026, about 2,000 ships are stranded in the area as a result of this closure. As a result of this shutdown, though, other energy product suppliers have seen demand for their oil and gas and the like increase, and that’s led to higher prices for these products. Russia, for instance, which doesn’t rely on the Strait to get its oil and gas out to its customers, has seen its oil tax revenue double in April, and the price of one grade of oil that it sells increased by 73% from February, alone. That’s a big windfall for Russia, which has had trouble selling its oil and gas at a significant profit, due in part to heavy sanctions that have resulted from its invasion of Ukraine. It’s continued to sell to countries like China and India, but those customers have been able to pay lower prices due to the lessened demand for what Russia is selling. This increased demand has thus goosed profits for Russia at a moment in which it could really use those sorts of profits—its economy is not doing terribly well, again because of its invasion of Ukraine, which has also not been going terribly well—so while inflation caused by this gas price-spike has been near-universally not great for much of the world, because energy cost increases tend to increase the price of just about everything, Russia’s government, at least, has been pretty happy with the shutdown of the Strait, and would probably love to see it continue. Another moderate benefactor of this shutdown has been the United States government. The US is the number one exporter of liquified natural gas, and one of the top exporters of oil and petroleum products. US export numbers are poised to hit new records with the closure of the Strait, too, because, just like with Russia, fewer products of this kind available on the global market means those who have such products to sell can charge higher prices for them. There’s a good chance this disruption, even if it ended today, for good, will have permanently rewired at least some of the global petroleum industry, as companies and countries that have been left in the lurch have adjusted their risks analyses and determined that it makes more sense to buy from different suppliers, to sell to different customers, or, in some cases, to use fewer of these products and invest more enthusiastically in renewables, like solar and wind—so while the US and Russia and a few other players are somewhat pleased with how things are going, oil and gas price-wise at least, long term this could actually harm them, the most, as more of their customers decide to stop paying irregular prices for what they’re selling and to opt for less turbulent solar and wind power, instead. What I’d like to talk about today is another knock-on effect of the war in Iran that could have significant international, possibly even military implications. — Since Trump first stepped into office, winning the US presidency back in 2016, allies have openly wondered whether the US could be relied upon as a military ally, should push come to shove. Trump has repeated said that he thinks NATO is a rip-off for the US, as the US has long provided the vast majority of funding and weapons for the alliance, and he’s pushed European NATO members to step up their own investment, lest he decide to just led Russia or whomever else attack them; he’s openly speculated that he might do exactly that. As a result of the US’s pivot away from happily playing the role of world police and invasion deterrent, European governments have been hastily putting together contingency plans that don’t include the US: if Russia turns its attention away from Ukraine and starts attacking the Baltics or Poland, they want to be ready, and they don’t want to have to rely on the unreliable Trump administration for their survival. Other governments that have long assumed they would be protected, at least in part, by the overwhelming force of the US military, have also been rethinking things, based on Trump’s stated, if not always practiced, isolationism. Taiwan, for instance, which is persistently menaced by China, which considers Taiwan to be a rebel asset that it will someday reclaim, has also been investing in its own defenses, no longer certain that the US will step up and help them out at their moment of greatest need, despite historical assumptions. Adding to that uncertainty, though, is the increasingly depleted state of the US military following its attack on Iran, which began in earnest in late February of this year. Since February, the US has expended around 1,100 long-range stealth cruise missiles, more than a thousand Tomahawk cruise missiles, more than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles, and more than a thousand Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-base missiles. For context, those Patriot missiles cost $4 million apiece, and again, 1,200 of them have been used since February, and the US military only buys about 100 Tomahawks a year, so the military has spent 10-years worth of them already during this new conflict in Iran. And those 1,100 stealth cruise missiles were built for a potential war with China, but now they’re gone. This rapid depletion of armaments, weapons that take a long time to make and which are very expensive to procure, has required that stockpiles from elsewhere around the world be quickly packed up and shipped to the Middle East; and while the majority of what’s been fired so far by the US have been missiles, these shipments include all sorts of bombs, vehicles, and personnel equipment like guns and bullets, too, because they have to be ready for anything. The military has also redirected assets, like missile systems and carrier strike groups, from other theaters, like the Pacific Ocean, to the Middle East, which leaves allies, like Taiwan and South Korea, less well-defended against potential incursions. The US has refused to release any estimates as to the cost of the attack on Iran so far, but a pair of independent groups have estimated that price tag to be somewhere between $28 and $35 billion, which is about a billion dollars a day. What’s more, it’s estimated that it will take about six years just to get armament stores back up to where they were in February, before this attack; it’s not just costly, it also takes a long time to produce that many missiles and rockets. And notably, a lot of these weapons were already considered to be in short supply before this conflict, at levels not suitable for a full-on shootout with an enemy like China, according to military experts. So six years plus whatever would be necessary to get up to more suitable levels. This shortfall is partly the result of how the US military deals with defense contractors, and there are efforts by new military startups to remedy this sort of situation, making manufacturing a lot more nimble, while also shifting to cheaper weapons, like drones and inexpensive interceptors, to replace the pricy, conventional ones that the country has long relied on. This expanded production hasn’t begun in earnest, though, and conventional military hardware suppliers have been slow to spin up new production because new funding hasn’t yet been confirmed by the Pentagon. So the US military is currently low on the weapons it would need to defend its allies in Europe or the South China Sea against attacks by rival, near-peer nations, at a moment in which such nations are making big moves, like China’s persistent expansion into the South China Sea, and Russia’s adventurism in Ukraine. What’s more, these stockpiles are unlikely to be resupplied any time soon, the capacity to produce what’s needed simply doesn’t exist, not in the US, anyway, and next-step options, like mass-scale drone production, also haven’t kicked off in earnest, yet, and might not arrive for another 5 or 10 years. This already precarious moment has been made all the more precarious by the US government’s decision to attack Iran, then, and that decision still hasn’t been fully explained, the actual end-goal unknown. Consequently, there also doesn’t seem to be a clear end-point to aim and plan for. Show Notes https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/iran-war-complicates-contingency-plans-to-defend-taiwan-some-u-s-officials-say-4384f7c1 http://nytimes.com/2026/04/16/world/middleeast/iran-war-cost-congress.html https://www.aei.org/foreign-and-defense-policy/epic-fury-costs-as-of-the-april-8-cease-fire/ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/us/politics/iran-war-cost-military.html https://gulfnews.com/world/mena/is-the-iran-war-depleting-us-weapons-too-fast-1.500517800 https://www.moneycontrol.com/world/iran-war-drains-us-munitions-raises-taiwan-defence-concerns-report-article-13898019.html https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-rearms-iran-ceasefire-advanced-munitions-supplies/ https://www.ft.com/content/1a5a2502-a45a-40c1-af6f-b30ecc34bacb https://archive.is/20260424042150/https://www.ft.com/content/1a5a2502-a45a-40c1-af6f-b30ecc34bacb https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/world/europe/europe-defense-nato-trump-eu.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/04/23/aircraft-carrier-bush-iran/ https://archive.md/T9tD1 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-31/trump-s-iran-war-is-accelerating-the-global-energy-transition https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/18/fossil-fuel-trump-green-revolution-us-iran-renewable-energy https://www.axios.com/2026/04/24/trump-oil-export-ceiling-iran-strait-hormuz This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

This week we talk about Orbán, Hungary, and reformers. We also discuss Fidesz, Tisza, and illiberalism. Recommended Book: I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin Transcript Hungary is a Central European country that was formed in the aftermath of WWI as part of the Treaty of Trianon, which—due to it having fought on the losing side of that conflict—resulted in the loss of more than 70% of its former territory, most of its economy, nearly 60% of its population, and about 32% of ethnic Hungarians who were left scattered across land that was given to neighboring countries when what was then Austria-Hungary was broken apart, initially by Hungary declaring independence from Austria, and then by those neighbors carving it up, grabbing land at the end of and just after the war, all of them pretty pissed at Hungary for being part of the Central Powers, quadruple alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria. Today, Hungary is surrounded on all sides by other nations, including those who gobbled up some of their territory, back in the day. They’ve got Slovakia to their north, Ukraine to their northeast, Romania is to the east, and Serbia is to the south. Croatia and Slovenia are to their southwest, and Austria, which used to be part of the same nation as Hungary, is to their west. In 2026, Hungary has a population of a little over 9.5 million people, and the vast majority of those people, around 97.7%, are ethnic Hungarians, the next-largest ethnic group is Romani, weighing in at just 2.4%. During WWII, Hungary was on the Axis side of the conflict, once again ending up on the losing side of a world war, and was eventually occupied by the Soviet Union, which converted the nation into a satellite state called the Hungarian People’s Republic. Hungarians tried to revolt their way out of the Soviet Union’s grip in 1956, but it didn’t work. In 1989, though, during the wave of other regional revolutions that tore the Soviet Union apart, Hungary peacefully transitioned into a parliamentary democracy, and it joined the EU in 2004. What I’d like to talk about today is post-Soviet, Third Republic Hungary, the country’s conversion into an ultra-conservative, ultra-corrupt state, and how a decade and a half of democratic backsliding might be eased, at least somewhat, by new leadership that just won an overwhelming majority in Hungary’s recent elections. — In the 1990s, Hungary began its transition from state-run authoritarianism under the Soviets into the type of capitalism-centered democracy that was being spread by the US and its allies during the Cold War. In Hungary, like many other post-Soviet nations, this transition wasn’t smooth, and the country experienced a severe economic recession that sparked all manner of social upsets, as well. Hungary’s Socialist Party did really well in elections for a while, in large part because of how badly capitalism seemed to doing, and all the downsides locals now associated with it, but the Socialists went back and forth with other governments, especially the liberal conservative Fidesz (FEE-dez) party, each government taking the reins for four years before being voted out, replaced by the opposition, which was then voted out four years later and replaced by their opposition. In 2006, there was a big to-do about a report that the then-Prime Minister, in charge of the Socialist Party, had admitted behind closed doors to having lied to win the last election. “We lied in the morning, we lied in the evening, and we lied at night,” he said during that closed-doors speech, and the divulgence of this led to nationwide protests and a period, which continues today, in which no left-wing party could attain power, only conservative governments standing a chance of running things in Hungary. In 2010, the Fidesz party, led by Viktor Orbán, won a supermajority in parliament, and the following year, parliament approved a new constitution that brought a huge number of significant changes to the government and the nation’s laws. This adoption was criticized for basically being a nation-defining document that enshrines the party’s Conservative Christian ideology into law, permanently, despite that ideology not reflecting the views of the country at large; just over 40% of Hungary identifies as Christian. This new constitution also significantly cut or curtailed the rights of formerly independent institutions, removing basically all checks on the government’s power, and making it nearly impossible to push back against anything they might want to do, moving forward. Under Orbán, Hungary saw significant democratic backsliding, meaning the country was converted from a functioning democracy into something that looked like a democracy from the outside, with elections and a press and such, but with actual functionality closer to that of Russia, which also holds elections, but those elections are tightly controlled by the government, the outcomes preordained by locking up those who challenge the existing power structure and falsifying votes when necessary. The press, too, in Russia and Hungary, is severely limited in what it can report, those who fail to toe the party line locked up or otherwise punished, and most of these formerly and supposedly journalistic entities owned by close friends of the country’s leader. This sort of setup is often called a kleptocracy or mafia-state, that hides behind the veil of democracy, because the people up top basically just do whatever they want, perpetually enriching themselves at the expense of their countrymen, and they get away with it because all the forces of government and opposition that might stand in their way are systematically removed, all while they continue to pretend that this is what the people want. Both Hungary and Russia also publicly embrace illiberal governance, at least to some degree, meaning they loudly promote top-down systems of governance, and both of their top-down systems are vehemently anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT rights, anti-women’s rights, and pro-fellow illiberal states—which in this case means Hungary and Orbán tend to be close buddies with other oppressive nations, like Russia, like Iran, and like China. Orbán has thus overseen the transition of Hungary from a liberalizing, open, post-Soviet nation into a different sort of totalitarian state, his version wearing the guise of western democracy instead of Stalinesque communism, but actually functioning as a private kingdom of sorts for Orbán and his friends, all of whom became wealthy by carving up state assets and making deals that favor them, just that group of oligarchs, and all of this happening at the expense of the Hungarian people and its institutions and resources. That context established, let’s talk about what happened recently, during the 2026 Hungarian parliamentary elections. On April 12, 2026, Hungary held elections to fill all 199 seats in the country’s parliament. 100 seats are necessary to achieve a majority, and thus to form a government and run things. Orbán’s party, Fidesz, was seeking a fifth consecutive term, partnering with the Christian Democratic People’s Party in the hopes of elbowing out a newer competitor, the conservative, center-right Tisza (TEE-sah) party. This election had been promoted as the most important in EU history, as while he was in control of Hungary, Orbán had been pushing the nation further and further into Russia’s orbit, allegedly even sharing classified information from private EU meetings with Russia’s government. He consistently also stood in the way of EU efforts to help support Ukraine, blocking billions of dollars of funding for Ukraine’s defensive efforts against Russia’s continuing invasion of its neighbor; if one EU member country says no, some bloc-wide efforts can be shut-down in perpetuity. And Orbán was a consistent ‘no’ for anything that was bad for Russia, or anything that was good for the EU, in the liberal democracy sense of good. He also regularly demanded what amounted to bribes to get his vote for just about anything, and was thus a consistent obstructionist for even normal government business within the bloc. This new Tisza party, which is a Hungarian abbreviation for what translates as the Respect and Freedom Party, was established in 2020, then rose to prominence when a former Orbán ally and Fidesz member, Péter Magyar left Fidesz and joined with Tisza. Tisza ran on populist principles and the overthrow of Orbán, who has been increasingly unpopular as he’s continued to heavy-handedly reinforce his own hold on power, rigging election maps so that nothing but the most overwhelming imbalance in votes against him would ever lead to a loss. Unfortunately for him, that’s exactly what happened in this 2026 election: nearly 80% of potential voters turned out to vote, which is the highest since 1989, when communism originally collapsed throughout Europe. And Tisza, the new opposition party led by a former Orbán loyalist, who left Fidesz during a scandal during which the government oversaw the pardoning of people responsible for covering up child sexual abuse, Tisza took 141 of 199 seats, giving them the supermajority they need to not just form a government, but to change the constitution. This is being seen as a massive victory for the EU, and a serious defeat for Russian President Putin, who will likely be losing a lot of influence in the region, but also his proxy within the EU, which allowed him to forestall and halt all sorts of anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian efforts. It’s also being seen as a possible shot across the bow of illiberal and illiberalizing governments around the world, including others within Europe, but also that of the United States, which has seem similar democratic backsliding under two non-consecutive Trump administrations. The same forces that led to Orbán’s loss, like a successful anti-corruption message communicated by his opposition, collapsing on-the-ground economic realities for the majority of Hungarian citizens, and a wave of support for the opposition, especially amongst young people, could lead to more toppled governments and strongman leaders in the coming years. There are still quite a few unknowns and potential pitfalls here, though. Magyar, though now the leader of a different party, was formerly in Orbán’s camp; this could represent a changing of the guard up top, someone else holding the reins and enriching himself and a different group of friends, rather than a wholesale change that serves those at the bottom. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen an authoritarian replaced by a seeming freedom-fighter who then became an authoritarian, because all those former incentives remained in place when they stepped into office. It’s also been posited that Putin might lean more heavily on Bulgaria as Hungary steps out of his sphere of influence; one pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian, anti-EU European Union nation replaced by another, the obstructionism continuing, but with different people on the Russian payroll. As I’m recording this, polls from elections in Bulgaria that happened this past weekend seem to favor Bulgaria’s former president, who is pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine, though his administration seems to be filled with pro-EU representatives. It could be that he plays nice with the West while still opposing support for Ukraine, or it could be he waits to see which way the large-scale winds blow before deciding how to lean; he’s been pretty vague about how he’ll govern, and the people of Bulgaria seem like they’ll be happy just to have a functioning government after a long period without. So this guy could represent a foot in the door for Putin, but he could also be a reformer; he could also be a bit of both. It’s also possible Orbán, who admitted defeat in the face of his opponent’s overwhelming parliamentary victory, will try some kind of last minute maneuver to stay in power, claiming that the vote was rigged against in him some way, for instance—a classic authoritarian move that has been repeated by these sorts governments over and over, including in modern history, and at times, unfortunately, successfully. Show Notes https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/15/hungarys-magyar-urges-president-to-quit-vows-to-overhaul-state-media https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g40npz37lo https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/04/18/bulgaria-election-radev-russia-orban/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-18/hungary-s-tisza-party-widens-election-majority-in-fresh-tally https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/opinion/hungary-election-orban-loses-trump-maga.html https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/18/hungary-peter-magyar-donald-tusk-poland-europe https://apnews.com/article/hungary-eu-unlock-funds-orban-5a208f4094d4d66a47de9fc10b9d194f https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/hungary-putin-orban-russia-ukraine-b2959920.html https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/hungary-orban-loss/686832/ https://www.npr.org/2026/04/16/nx-s1-5784063/hungarian-americans-orban-defeat-trump-authoritarianism-democrats-republicans https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/online-analysis/2026/04/hungarys-election-significance-and-implications/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/17/eu-officials-hungary-talks-peter-magyar-government https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-hungarys-vote-to-oust-viktor-orban-could-have-global-implications https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/hungary-just-voted-out-viktor-orban-heres-what-to-expect-in-europe-and-beyond/ https://geopoliticalfutures.com/hungarys-landmark-election/ https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/could-bulgaria-replace-hungary-as-putins-proxy-inside-the-eu/ https://ecfr.eu/article/four-principles-for-an-eu-hungary-reset/ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/world/europe/hungary-election-results-orban-magyar.html https://apnews.com/article/hungary-election-orban-magyar-trump-1a4eb0ba6b94e0c80c3cd18bd36254ab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Trianon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_diaspora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_Law_of_Hungary https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/world/europe/bulgaria-elections-what-to-know.html This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about Project Glasswing, Anthropic, and Q Day. We also discuss exploit markets, vulnerabilities, and zero days. Recommended Book: The Culture Map by Erin Meyer Transcript In the world of computer security, a zero-day vulnerability is an issue that exists within a system at launch—hence, zero-day, it’s there at day zero of the system being available—that is also unknown to those who developed said system. Thus, if Microsoft released a new version of Windows that had a security hole that they didn’t know about, but someone else, a hacking group maybe, discovered before it was released, they might use that vulnerability in Windows or Word or whatever else to hack the end-users of that software. While large companies like Microsoft do a pretty good job, considering the scope and scale of their product library, of identifying and fixing the worst of the security holes that might leave their customers prone to such attacks, that same scope and scale also means it’s nearly impossible to fill every single possible gap: a truism within the cybersecurity world is that defenders need to get it right every single time, and attackers only need to get it right once, and the same is true here. There’s never been a perfect piece of software, and as these things expand in capability and complexity, the opportunity to miss something also increases, and thus, so does the range of possible errors and exploitable imperfections. Because of how damaging zero-days can be for both users of software and the companies that make that software, there are thriving marketplaces, similar to those that deal in other illicit goods, where those who discover such vulnerabilities can sell them, usually for cryptocurrencies or funds derived from stolen credit cards. Software companies have countered the increasing sophistication of these exploit black markets with white and grey market efforts, the former being direct payouts to hackers, basically saying hey, thanks for finding this bug, here’s a lump-sum of money, a bug bounty, rather than punishing all hacking of their systems, which is how they would have previously responded, which had the knock-on effect of sending all hackers, even those who weren’t looking to cause trouble, either underground, or actively hunting for bugs for the black market. The grey market is more complicated and diverse, and also the largest of marketplaces for those shopping around for these types of exploits. And it’s populated by the same sorts of neverdowells who might frequent the exploit black markets, but also includes all sorts of governments and intelligence agencies, who scoop up these sorts of vulnerabilities to use against their opponents, or to deny them to others who might use them instead, against them. All sorts of governments, from the US to Russia to North Korea to Iran are regular shoppers on these computer system exploit grey markets, and that has created a complicated, entangled system of incentives, as is some cases, it’s better for the US government, or Iranian government, or whomever, if the company making these systems doesn’t know about a bug or other vulnerability, because they just spent several million dollars to buy a map to said bug or gap, which could, at some point in the future, allow them to tunnel into an enemy’s computers and cause damage or steal information. What I’d like to talk about today is a new AI system that is apparently very, very good at identifying these sorts of exploits, and why this is being seen as a milestone moment for some people operating in the zero day, and overall computer security space. — On April 7, 2026, US-based AI company Anthropic announced Project Glasswing—a new initiative that is currently only available to 11 companies that’s meant to help those companies shore-up their cyber defenses before more AI systems like the one that underpins Project Glasswing, which is called Mythos Preview, hit the market. So these companies, Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks, make a lot of stuff, and in particular make and maintain a lot of vital online and device-based software infrastructure, like operating systems and all the stuff that keeps things in our apps and on the web secure. Mythos Preview is a new model created by Anthropic, similar to their existing Claude models, but apparently vastly more powerful. There are tests that AI companies use to compare the potency of their models at a variety of task types, but those are generally considered to be flawed or game-able in all sorts of ways, so the main thing to know here is that Mythos did way better at most of those tests, especially the coding, the programming-related ones, than the other, currently most capable models, the ones that professional programmers, most of them anyway, are using these days. It was also able to do impressive and worrying things like break out of the sandbox that contained it, accessing the internet when it wasn’t supposed to be able to do so. And because of that leap forward in programming capability, Mythos Preview was tasked by Anthropic with finding vulnerabilities in all sorts of software systems, including operating systems—Windows, macOS, iOS—and browsers, like Chrome and Firefox. Most AI systems, and most human coders, if they focus enough and look really hard for long enough, will tend to find some kind of vulnerability in just about anything, because this software is just that big and complex. But within a relatively short period of time, Mythos Preview found thousands of vulnerabilities in these systems, indicating that it’s a lot better at this kind of task than the other AI available these days, and so Anthropic created this project, Project Glasswing, to give these entities a head-start, helping them fill these gaps and bolster their defenses, before everyone else on the planet, including foreign governments, hacker and terrorist groups, but also just everyday people, suddenly have the ability to identify and possibly exploit these vulnerabilities, on scale. This news hasn’t been super widely reported in the non-tech press quite yet, but within the tech world, it landed like a hand grenade in a crowded room. And there are already quite a few perspectives on what this all means, including a fair bit of skepticism. On the skeptic side, many analysts have noted that it’s a common tactic amongst AI companies to doomsay, to basically suggest that their models might end the world, might kill all of humanity, might dramatically change everything, put everyone out of work, maybe, not necessarily because the founders and employees at those companies believe that would be the case, but because the implication is that if these products are that powerful, well, investors should probably give them gobs of money, because a tool that could end the world or cause that much disruption might be the last tool available, or might become the next electricity or internet or whatever else. Claiming philosophical, humanistic concern for the super-weapon you just built, in other words, is one way for AI company leaders to say their product is superior to every other product ever while also seeming to suggest that they are the thoughtful, careful leaders that we need holding the reins of that sort of capacity. Other skeptics have said that while this might be a step-up in terms of the speed at which such vulnerabilities can be identified in these sorts of systems, other AI systems, existing ones, even open source, free ones, have been able to do the same for a while now. So while Mythos Preview might be even better at it, and might be capable of running constantly, finding more and more of these things for a government that wants to save money they might otherwise spend on the grey market, scooping these things up for use against their enemies, or for defensive purposes, sharing some of them with their homegrown tech companies, perhaps, smaller, less-moneyed groups can already do the same, if they’re smart about how they apply existing, even free, lower-end AI systems. Others have responded to this announcement similarly to how some have responded to the concept of Q Day, short for Quantum Day, which refers to the hypothetical moment at which quantum computers finally become powerful enough to break the encryption that allows the internet, and banking, and government privacy systems to function. If these encryption keys can be broken—and quantum computers should theoretically be able to do this a lot better than conventional computers, because of their very nature—if and when that happens, if these systems aren’t suitably prepared with new encryption that’s hardened against quantum systems, the entire banking sector could collapse, everything hackable, all the money stealable, none of it trustworthy anymore. The same with the whole of the web, with apps, with government systems that keep things hidden away and classified, with energy grids. It could be chaos. The theory here, then, is that this type of AI, maybe Mythos Preview, maybe the other systems that it portends—because this whole industry seems to leapfrog itself every three or four months at this point, someone coming out with a big, cool, most powerful new thing, then their competitors coming out with something even more powerful within weeks or months—maybe these vulnerability-identifying and exploiting AI will result in something similar, all the world’s software and encryption a lot more vulnerable, all at once, essentially tomorrow. It’s more of what we’ve already seen with AI, basically, these tools providing anyone who uses them more leverage to do all sorts of things. Not necessarily creating anything new—exploits and vulnerabilities have always existed—but giving a skilled hacker the ability to find and exploit thousands of them in the same time it would have previously taken them to find and exploit just one. And it could also give unskilled, non-hackery people and entities similar capabilities. That creates a dramatically new cybersecurity landscape essentially overnight, and that’s why, at least according to their press releases on the matter, Anthropic is not releasing Mythos Preview to the public, and instead is taking the Project Glasswing approach: they don’t think other AI companies, like OpenAI or xAI, can be trusted not to just lob that grenade into the crowded room, so since they got there first, they’re going to try to help everyone protect themselves from that grenade when it inevitably lands. This could, then, be quite the PR coup, giving Anthropic the opportunity to tout their superior products, while also allowing them to portray themselves as sort of the white knight in the AI world, helping everyone protect themselves, even though they probably could have made far more money by either selling the exploits and creating their own new market for them, or by somehow leveraging those exploits themselves. At the same time, it could be that they are overselling the capabilities of this new model, painting a rosy picture with them as the heroes, while in turn makes their products seem more powerful than they are in order to bolster their public perception and future economic potential. It could also be a bit of both; even those who are skeptical about this specific announcement and the implications of it do tend to agree it’s likely we’ll see more disruption from these sorts of models soon. Even if Mythos Preview isn’t the grenade everyone’s worried about, in other words, it’s likely we’ll face such a threat in the near-future, and even if Project Glasswing isn’t the defense we need against such a threat, it’s probably prudent that we be thinking about whatever it is we do need, and ideally building it, too, so it’s ready to go, already in place, when that new threat lands. Show Notes https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/briefing/claude-mythos-preview.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/anthropic-claims-its-new-ai-model-mythos-is-a-cybersecurity-reckoning.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_(language_model)#Claude_Mythos_Preview https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-mythos-preview-project-glasswing/ https://stratechery.com/2026/myth-and-mythos/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-day_vulnerability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_for_zero-day_exploits This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

This week we talk about modems, WiFi, and kinda sorta bribes. We also discuss Huawei, government subsidies, and the FCC. Recommended Book: Replaceable You by Mary Roach Transcript Many homes, those with WiFi connections to the internet, have two different devices they use to make that connectivity happen. The first is a modem, which is what connects directly to your internet service provider, often via an ethernet jack in the wall that connects to a series of cables webbed throughout your city. The second is a router, which plugs into the modem and then spreads that signal, derived from that network of city-wide cables around your home, either by splitting that single ethernet jack into multiple ethernet jacks, allowing multiple devices to plug into that network, or by creating a wireless signal, WiFi, that multiple devices can connect to wirelessly in the same way. Many routers will have both options, though in most homes and for most modern devices, WiFi tends to be the more common access point because of its convenience, these days. That WiFi signal, and the connection provided via those additional ethernet ports on the router, create what’s called a Local Area Network of devices, or LAN. This local area network allow these devices—your phone and your laptop, for instance—to connect to each other directly, but its primary role for most people is using that connection to the modem to grant these devices access the wider internet. In addition to providing that internet access and creating the Local Area Network, connecting devices on that network to each other, routers also usually provide a layer of security to those devices. This can be done via firewalls and with encryption, which is important as unprotected networks can leave the devices plugged into them vulnerable to outside attack. That means if the router is breached or in some other way exploited, a whole company’s worth of computers, or all your local devices at home, could be made part of a botnet, could be held hostage by ransomware, or could be keylogged until you provide login information for your banks or other seemingly secure accounts to whomever broke into that insufficiently protected LAN. What I’d like to talk about today is a recently announced ban on some types of routers in the US, the reasoning behind this ban, and what might happen next. — On March 23, 2026, the US Federal Communications Commission announced a ban on the import of all new consumer-grade routers not made in the United States. This ban does not impact routers that are already on the market and in homes, so if you have one already, you’re fine. And if you’re buying an existing model, that should be fine, too. It will apply to new routers, though, and the rationale provided by the FCC with the announcement is that imported routers are a “severe cybersecurity risk that could be leveraged to immediately and severely disrupt US critical infrastructure.” They also cited recent, major hacks like Salt Typhoon, saying that routers brought into the US provided a means of entry for some components of those attacks. This stated concern is similar to the one that was at the center of the Trump administration’s 2019 ban of products made by Chinese tech company Huawei in the United States. Huawei made, and still makes, all kinds of products, including consumer-grade smartphones, and high-end 5G equipment sold to telecommunications companies around the world for use in their infrastructure. The concern was that a company like Huawei might leverage its far better prices, which were partly possible because of backing from the Chinese government, to put foreign competitors out of business. From there, they could dominate these industries, while also getting their equipment deep in the telecommunications infrastructure of the US and US allies. Then, it would be relatively easy to insert spy equipment and eavesdrop on phone calls and data transmissions from phones, or to incorporate kill-switches into these grids, so if China ever needed to, for instance, distract the US and its allies while they invaded Taiwan, they could just push a button, kill the US telecommunications grid, and that would buy them some time and fog of war to do what they wanted to do without immediate repercussions; and undoing a successful invasion would be a million times more difficult than stepping in while it’s happening to prevent it. As of 2024, Huawei still controlled about a third of the global 5G market. It controlled about 27.5% back in 2019, the year it was banned in the US and in many US allied nations, so while it’s possible they could have grown even bigger than that had the ban not been implemented, they still grew following its implementation. Chinese companies currently control about 60% of the US router market, and it’s likely the local, US market will shift, reorienting toward US makers over the next decade or so. But it’s possible these Chinese companies will grow their global footprint even further, as previous US bans have pushed them into different, less exploited markets, and that’s resulted in a wider footprint for such companies, even if their profits may drop a little after leaving the spendier US market. There’s also a pretty good chance we’ll see deals to move more manufacturing to the US, which could allow some of these companies to make relatively small changes to their operations in order to bypass the ban entirely. This seems extremely likely, at least in the short term, as all major players in the US router market fall under the FCC’s definition of not being entirely US owned and operated, and making consumer-grade routers that are designed or manufactured outside the US. Even the ostensibly more US companies, based and founded here, make their stuff primarily in Southeast Asia; so even those companies would seem to fall afoul of this new rule. The FCC has also given these companies the opportunity to apply for what’s called Conditional Approval from the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security, which would require they give a bunch of details about their company and products to these entities, along with plans to manufacture more stuff in the US, and these departments can then give them permission to keep selling in the meantime. It’s worth mentioning here that this kind of set up has previously given foreign entities a chance to funnel money into President Trump’s properties and businesses, before then speaking with him or one of his representatives and coming to some kind of agreement, the President then instructing the relevant agencies or departments to let those companies through, the ban not applying to them or not applying in the same way. There are concerns that such bans basically operate as requests for bribes, in other words, and those who don’t pay up see their customer base dwindle in the US market, while those who do get away with a slap on the wrist so long as they promise to make more stuff in the US at some point—though they’re not really held to that promise in any concrete way, and often that’s where their efforts stop, at the announcement of such changes. Also worth mentioning is that it’s not clear why this applies only to consumer-grade routers, as it would seem like the industrial- and military-grade ones would be of even greater concern, at least based on the claims made by the FCC when announcing this ban. We also don’t know why it’s being applied to new models, but not models currently being sold, and not those already in our homes; all of which would seem to be just as vulnerable as newer models that haven’t made it to the market yet. There’s a chance those details will follow, and there’s also a chance, again, that this is more about the administration maybe accumulating promises from foreign companies to move manufacturing to the US, because that looks good in an election year, and it’s maybe another means of accumulating bribes from companies that would find it far cheaper to make contributions to organizations the President either controls or favors, than to build new manufacturing capacity in the US, or leave the market entirely. Show Notes https://www.theverge.com/tech/899906/fcc-router-ban-march-2026-explainer https://archive.is/20260326232922/https://www.theverge.com/tech/899906/fcc-router-ban-march-2026-explainer https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/i-review-routers-for-a-living-dont-buy-a-router-right-now/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Router_(computing) https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-updates-covered-list-include-foreign-made-consumer-routers https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/fcc-banning-imports-new-chinese-made-routers-citing-security-concerns-2026-03-23/ https://www.wired.com/story/us-government-foreign-made-router-ban-explained/ https://itif.org/publications/2025/10/27/backfire-export-controls-helped-huawei-and-hurt-us-firms/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

This week we talk about cheap drones, energy resources, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We also discuss the Strait of Hormuz, the war in Iran, and economic asymmetry. Recommended Book: The Age of Extraction by Tim Wu Transcript Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been pretty universally bad for everyone involved, very much including Russia, which going into the fifth year of this conflict, which it started by massing troops on its neighbor’s border and invading, unprovoked, following years of funding asymmetric military incursions in Ukraine’s southeast. Following their full invasion though, Russia has reportedly suffered around 1.25 million casualties, with more than 400,000 of those casualties suffered in 2025, alone. It’s estimated that Russia has also suffered at least 325,000 deaths, and Ukrainian officials reported confirmed kills of more than 30,000 Russian soldiers just in January 2026. As of early 2026, Russian controlled about 20% of Ukraine, down from the height of its occupation, back in March of 2022, when it controlled 26% of the country. And due to a combination of military spending, intense and expansive international sanctions, and damage inflicted by Ukraine, it’s estimated that Russia has incurred about $1 trillion in damages, about a fifth of that being direct operational expenses, and around a fourth the result of reduced growth and lost assets stemming from all those sanctions. There’s a good chance that all of these numbers, aside from the land controlled, are undercounts, too, as some estimates rely on official figures, and those figures are generally assumed to be partially fabricated to allow Russia to keep face in what is already a pretty humiliating situation—a war they started and which they thought would be a walk in the park, lasting maybe a week, but which has instead gone on to reshape their entire country and present one of the biggest threats to Putin’s control over the Kremlin since he took office. That in mind, a report from last week, at the tail-end of March, suggests that the Kremlin knows things aren’t looking great for them, and they asked Russian oligarchs to donate money to the cause, to help stabilize Russian finances. This report, which is unconfirmed, but has been reported by multiple Russian media entities, arrives at a moment in which the Russian government is also planning cuts to all sorts of spending, including military spending, but also a reported 10% across the board, to all “non-sensitive” matters in its 2026 budget. Despite these fairly abysmal figures, though, there’s some optimism in Russia-supporting circles right now, in large part because the conflict in Iran, and Iran’s near shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz, which is an important channel for the flow of international energy assets, that’s goosed the price of oil and gas, which in turn has goosed Russian income substantially. What I’d like to talk about today are the interconnections between the conflict in Ukraine and the conflict in Iran, and how Ukraine being invaded seems to have put them in a position of relative influence and authority in this new conflict in the Middle East. — From the moment Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian military, and its government, industrial base, and pretty much everyone else, scrambled to find an asymmetric means of keeping a far larger, wealthier, and ostensibly more experienced and better backed foe from just steam-rolling over them. They found that by leveraging lower-cost deterrents, like cheap rockets and drones, they could pay something like $10,000 to take out a tank or other weapons platform that cost Russia a million or ten million dollars. That’s a pretty stellar trade-off, and if you can do that over and over again, eventually you make the cost of the conflict just ridiculously unbalanced, each trade of hardware costing you very little and them a whole lot, which with time can making waging war unsustainable for the side paying orders of magnitudes more. Russia is of course making use of inexpensive drones and rockets, as well. That’s become a norm in modern conflicts, especially over the past five years or so, as cheap but capable and easy to produce models have started rolling of manufacturing lines in Iran and Turkey, allowing them to become popular sources of single-use but quite agile and deadly aerial weaponry. Ukraine has gone further than most other entities, though, as they’re immensely incentivized to get this right, and to put their full support behind anything that gives them the upper-hand against what’s still a powerful and otherwise overwhelming invading force. And this patchwork of companies, independent and government supported, large-ish and tiny enough to operate under constant fire and in wartime conditions, has since scaled-up so that they’re expected to manufacture about 7 million drones of many different varieties in 2026. This scaling has attracted a lot of outside investment, and Ukraine is now considered to be not just a bulwark against current Russian aggression in Europe, taking the brunt of the damage so that Russia isn’t able to turn its attention to the Baltic states and other potential, future targets. It’s also considered to be a vital resource for future protection against Russia, as the US has become a less reliable ally, and NATO, which until recently has been mostly funded and armed by the US, is still getting its legs under it, more members contributing both money and other resources, but possibly not fast enough. If Russia were to either win in Ukraine and then turn its full-tilt military machine further west, toward other parts of Europe, or if it were to come to some kind of stalemate or peace agreement in Ukraine and then do the same, many leaders throughout Europe believe that Ukrainians, grizzled and scar from this current invasion, will be the ones to train up comparably inexperienced NATO and European Union forces, and to provide the best new, asymmetry-focused military hardware, like drones of all shapes and sizes, as well. They’ll be not just the arsenal of NATO and the EU, they’ll also probably be the training officers and commanders. We already see evidence of this probable future demand for Ukrainian goods and services in Gulf states that were attacked by Iran shortly after Israel and the US launched their own attacks that killed Iran’s leader and caused a great deal of damage throughout the country. Five Iranian neighbors have reportedly made deals with Ukraine to help them defend against future attacks from Iran, especially drone and missile attacks against their energy and water infrastructure. This help comes in the form of Ukrainian technology, which has been forged by their war, defending against Russia’s incursion, but also training by Ukrainian experts, who are a lot more informed by those war-time realities, and know how to keep infrastructure safe while at the same time taking out the enemy’s capacity to attack in the future. Ukraine’s hardware is also super cheap compared to comparable alternatives. Ukraine can produce a long-range strike drone for about $200,000, compared to similar drones made by companies in other western countries that cost between $5-10 million. Ukrainian companies also produce far cheaper anti-personnel drones, and interceptor drones and rockets that can flip the cost considerations in some types of conflict. Often the attacker will launch a bunch of multi-million dollar rockets, alongside a bunch of $10,000 decoys. If your anti-rocket interceptors hit the decoys, and your interceptors cost more than those decoys, maybe a few million dollars apiece, you very quickly end up spending more than your attacker. Reducing the cost of those defensive materials, then, can give the defender the cost advantage, which makes holding out over the long-haul, but also producing enough interceptors to prevent infrastructure damage and save lives, more financially feasible. There’s a strange interconnectedness between these two conflicts, then, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has turned Ukraine into a military product and services powerhouse that’s only just now beginning to scale up, but already in high-demand, while at the same time, Iran’s actions in the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off energy product flow through this vital channel, is boosting Russia’s income dramatically at a moment in which it desperately needs that income to keep invading Ukraine. That influx of resources could help Russia maintain its invasion for longer than they could otherwise manage, and it could give them a leg up, an even bigger advantage than they already have, which in turn could force Ukraine to become even more skillful and experienced, even better at what they do, leading to even better weapons and tactics that they then share with clients and allies in the Middle East for use against Iran. Show Notes https://www.cfr.org/articles/securing-ukraines-future-in-europe-ukraines-defense-industrial-base-an-anchor-for-economic-renewal-and-european-security https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-ukraine-drone-defense-ecosystem-205253252.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/world/europe/ukraine-middle-east-oil-and-gas-drones.html https://gssr.georgetown.edu/the-forum/regions/eurasia/a-first-point-view-examining-ukraines-drone-industry/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/vikrammittal/2026/02/01/ukraine-is-winning-the-economics-battle-against-russian-geran-drones/ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/world/europe/ukraine-drones-china.html https://spectrum.ieee.org/drone-warfare-ukraine https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraines-interceptor-drone-makers-look-exports-gulf-iran-war-flares-2026-03-07/ https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/what-is-ukraines-interceptor-one-of-the-worlds-most-in-demand-drones-17055 https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/4-years-of-war-counting-russia-s-costs/3838920 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/23/the-ukraine-war-in-numbers-people-territory-money https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-grinding-war-ukraine https://news.sky.com/story/putin-asks-oligarchs-to-donate-to-budget-as-cost-of-ukraine-war-soars-13524940 https://www.reuters.com/world/putin-asks-oligarchs-donate-russias-budget-cost-ukraine-war-soars-bell-media-2026-03-27/ https://apnews.com/article/turkish-oil-tanker-attacked-black-sea-2998c366a90ed280e9781a8b030a050c https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-offensive-drones-c9976319f077c743317edec8a20f57f3 https://apnews.com/article/war-russia-ukraine-drones-innovation-interceptor-shahed-e9de7db6437d3cbb428a6bacac326fb3 https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-us-talks-iran-drones-40ad8f5481d954fe8207c3d576d540f7 https://www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/news/russia-blackmail-us-zelensky-ukraine-trump-b2945767.html https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-nato-rebuke-iran-war-11738554 https://www.euronews.com/2026/03/26/pentagon-mulls-redirecting-ukraine-military-aid-to-middle-east-reports-claim https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/ukraine-using-strikes-pressure-russia-after-oil-sanctions-eased-zelenskiy-says-2026-03-26/ https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/3/27/ukraine-fends-off-increased-attacks-strikes-russian-oil-revenue This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

This week we talk about the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and decapitation attacks. We also discuss Venezuela, Iran, and the Platt Amendment. Recommended Book: The Will of the Many by James Islington Transcript Cuba is a large island nation, about the same size as the US state of Tennessee, which formally gained its independence from Spain in late 1898, following three wars of independence, the last of which brought the US, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines into play against the Spanish when the Spanish military sunk the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, triggering the Spanish-American War. That conflict, which Spain lost, led to the US’s acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and it led to a piece of US legislation called the Platt Amendment, which redefined the relationship between the US and Cuba, following the war, making Cuba a protectorate of the United States, the US promising to leave, withdrawing its troops from Cuban soil, only if seven conditions were met, and an additional provision that Cuba sign a treaty indicating they would continue to adhere to these conditions moving forward—making them permanent. Most of these conditions relate to Cuba’s ability to enter into relationships with other nations, but provision three also says the US can intervene if doing so will preserve Cuban independence, and that Cuba will sell or lease to the US the land it needs to base its naval vessels in the area, so that it can intervene, militarily if necessary, to keep Cuba independent. The other provisions are largely related to ensuring Cuba stays financially solvent and clean, the former meant to help maintain that independence, so Cuba doesn’t make deals with other nations, perhaps US enemies, in order to bail itself out when financially in trouble, and the latter meant to help prevent the bubbling up of diseases in a not well-maintained Cuba, that might then spread to the US. These concerns were concerns for the US government because Cuba is very, very close to the US. It’s just over 90 miles away from Key West, Florida, and that means in the mind of those tasked with defending the US against foreign incursion, Cuba has long represented an uncontrolled variable where enemies could conceivably base all sorts of military assets, including but not limited to nuclear weapons. That makes Cuba, again, in the minds of defense strategists looking to help the US secure its borders, long-term, something like an aircraft carrier slash nuclear submarine the size of Tennessee, located so close to the US that it could take out all sorts of major assets in a flash, long before the US could respond, getting the same sorts of strike craft and missiles to the Soviet Union. This framing of the situation, and this collection of concerns, is what led to the Cuban Missile Crisis back in 1962, when the US deployed nuclear weapons in the UK, Italy, and Turkey, all of which were closer to major Soviet hubs than the US, and that led to a tit-for-tat move by the Soviets to deploy nuclear missiles to Cuba, both to get their own weapons closer to the US, just as the US did to them with those new deployments, but also to deter a potential US invasion of Cuba, which was a staunch ally of the Soviet Union. The crisis lasted 13 days, and though then US President Kennedy was advised to launch an air strike against Soviet missile supplies, and to then invade the Cuban mainland to prevent the basing of Soviet nuclear weapons there, he instead opted for a naval blockade of Cuba, hoping to keep more missile supplies from arriving, and to thus avoid a strike on a Soviet ally that could accidentally spark a shooting war. After this nearly two-week standoff, the US and Soviet leaders agreed that the Soviets would dismantle the offensive weapons they were building in Cuba in exchange for a public declaration by the US to not invade Cuba. The US also secretly pledged to dismantle its own offensive weapons that it had recently deployed to Italy and Turkey, and the weapons they deployed to the UK were also disbanded the following year. This sequence of events is generally seen as a minor victory for the US during an especially fraught portion of the Cold War, as that secret agreement between Kennedy and Soviet leader Khrushchev meant that the Soviet people and leadership perceived this agreement as an embarrassing loss, and an example of Soviet weakness on the international stage—they blinked and the US got what they wanted without giving much of anything, though of course, again, the US gave a fair bit too, just in secret. What I’d like to talk about today is a recent escalation in the US’s posture toward Cuba, and what might happen next, as a result of that change. — In early January 2026, the US military, ostensibly as part of a larger effort aimed at disrupting a network of watercraft that carry drugs from mostly South and Central American drugmakers across the border, into US markets, called Operation Southern Spear, the United States implemented a new blockade aimed at sanctioned oil tankers carrying fuel from Venezuela to, among other destinations, Cuban ports. Shortly before this blockade was declared, the US seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, then harassed, boarded, and intimidated other tankers, including one from Russia, that were also dealing in Venezuelan oil—something that US sanctions disallowed, and which the Trump administration had decided to focus on, ostensibly as part of that anti-drug effort, but also seemingly as part of a then-impending mission to kidnap Venezuelan President Maduro, who was then secreted away to the US to face trial, which is where he is, today. These seizures hit Cuba especially hard because the country is highly reliant on all sorts of imports, much of its income derived from tourism, not manufacturing or raw materials, and fuel coming from Venezuela was especially vital—about 72% of Cuba’s electricity generation comes from oil-fueled power plants, and basically its entire transportation section is reliant on the same. Venezuela under Maduro also provided oil to Cuba at a discount, subsidizing it because those US sanctions didn’t allow Venezuela to have many other reliable customers, and because the authoritarian governments of these two nations saw each other as fellow-travelers in the region, and thus wanted to keep each other propped up against constant pressure from the US and other democracies in the Americas. As of March 2026, Cuba has gone without crude oil deliveries for three months, and this has led to waves of flight cancellations and a depletion of tourism, which again, is the country’s most vital income source. As of mid-March, Cuba’s energy grid has also collapsed, which has left about 10 million people without power most of the time, amplifying existing problems caused by the country’s antiquated energy generation and distribution systems. All of which seems to be according to plan for the second US Trump administration, which announced, as far back as January of this year, that it was seeking regime change in Cuba, and these blackouts have triggered exceedingly rare violent protests against that regime by Cuban citizens; these protests haven’t led to any real change or consequences yet, but they could, with time. For their part, the Cuban government has said they’ve entered diplomatic talks with the US, and they’ve already agreed to release 51 political prisoners, just as an up-front, good will gesture. But they’ve also said changes to the Cuban political system or government—which is an authoritarian regime with absolute power, and which, like most such regimes, is openly corrupt, those in charge enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else, while keeping control via state-sanctioned violence against its own citizens—they’ve said changing that is non-negotiable, also noting that if there is direct aggression against Cuba by the US, they’ll fight and offer up “impenetrable resistance.’ The change that the US government seeks is reportedly similar to what was accomplished in Venezuela: booting the current leader, but keeping the existing regime, the power behind the publicly visible throne, intact, and then the US government influencing that existing regime from afar. This deviates from the assumed model, attempted by previous US and other governments throughout history, to boot the leaders of opposing government types and then replace them, and the local system, with something closer to their own. This new approach is possibly what the Trump administration is aiming for in Iran, as well, though it’s difficult to say how well the model will work even in Venezuela, where it’s still early days after the US’s seemingly successful decapitation attack, much less in places like Cuba, where there’s no single central power in the public-facing government, much of that power spread between Communist Party leaders, rather than hoarded by a single individual—a far cry from how things were under Castro during the Cold War. As of the day I’m recording this, there’s a new wrinkle in this blockade: a Russian oil tanker has been tracked heading along a trajectory that would seem to lead to Cuba, which, if accurate, could put the US and Russia at odds over deliveries to the island once more—though in this case it would be oil instead of offensive nuclear weapons that are on board the incursionary vessel. This ship may veer off that current course and head elsewhere, or it could be meant to test the US oil blockade, intentionally poking at what seems to be an impenetrable barrier, to see if it’s all just talk. Even if just that one tanker makes it through, it’s carrying enough oil to provide about a week’s worth of energy to the Cuban people, which could serve as a sort of release valve on the pressure-cooker stress that has led to the aforementioned protests against the government. Most analysts expect this and future vessels will turn off when formally confronted, though, and this isn’t the first ship that’s attempted to break this new blockade of Cuba; and previous attempters have indeed pulled off before a shot was fired by the blockading fleet. Trump has in recent weeks said that he believes he’ll be able to take Cuba, and/or do whatever he wants to the island and its people, and that could just be talk, or it could be that, like in Venezuela, and to some degree Iran, many of the locals would welcome that kind of change, despite the violence and suffering that would no doubt come with it. In the meantime, though, millions of Cubans are going without reliable energy, food, medical care, and other modern necessities, which could push them to take the risk of revolutionary action, but it could also turn them against the outside enemy, reinforcing support for the tyrannical Cuban government against the harmful and oppressive actions of the American military, rather than nudging them into government overthrow. Show Notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platt_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_Cuba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Cuban_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/cubas-national-electric-grid-collapses-says-grid-operator-2026-03-16 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/world/americas/cuba-fuel-blockade-aid-convoy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/travel/cuba-flights-travel-advice-power-oil.html https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/cuba-says-its-presidents-term-not-subject-negotiation-talks-with-us-2026-03-20/ https://www.dw.com/en/cuba-faces-economic-collapse-as-us-oil-blockade-hits-tourism/video-76398387 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

This week we talk about BYD, Tesla, and the Blade Battery 2.0. We also discuss EVs, internal-combustion engines, and autonomous vehicles. Recommended Book: Blank Space by W. David Marx Transcript Petroleum-powered vehicles, cars and trucks and SUVs of the kind that have become the standard since the mid-20th century, work by mixing fuel that you put in the tank when you fill up at the gas station with air, in the engine, and then creating a controlled explosion—in modern vehicles using what’s called a four-stroke combustion cycle of intake, compression, combustion, then exhaust—in order to move pistons which, in turn generate mechanical power by transferring that movement to the vehicle’s wheels. An electric vehicle, in contrast, functions by using electricity from a battery pack to power an electric motor. So rather than needing fuel to combust, which then moves pistons which then moves the wheels, EVs are a straighter-shot with less conversion of energy necessary, electricity powering the motor which powers the wheels. That simpler setup comes with many advantages, and that difference in the conversion of energy is a big one. Because most of the energy injected into the EV’s system is converted into mechanical movement for the wheels, this type of vehicle only loses about 11% of the energy you put into it to that conversion of electricity to mechanical energy process—around 31-35% is initially lost while charging, converting electricity to motion, and so on, but about 22% is recaptured by the vehicle’s brakes during operation, leading to that 11% average loss. A gas-powered vehicle, in contrast, because of the inefficiencies inherent in converting fuel to combustion to movement, loses somewhere between 75-84% of the energy you put into it at the gas station, much of that loss in the form of heat that is emitted as a result of that conversion process; this is an inevitable consequence of the thermodynamics of burning fuel to create motion, and one that means operating a gas-powered vehicle is inherently lossier, in the sense that you can’t help but lose the majority of what you put into it as waste, compared to an electric vehicle, which is less lossy to begin with, but even more efficient when you include that in-operation energy recovery. That baseline reality of energy usage means that modern electric vehicles will typically be cheaper to fuel, to power, because it requires less energy input to get the same amount of travel. This cost-benefit comparison shifts even further in favor of EVs when gas prices are high, though, and though currently the cost of EVs tend to be higher than gas-powered vehicles in most countries, EVs also offer substantially lower lifetime maintenance costs—an average of 40% lower than gas-powered vehicles, due largely to the dramatically reduced number of moving parts in EVs, and the lack of regular, recurring engine-related maintenance tasks, like oil changes and replacing spark plugs. Not even considering the externalities-related savings of owning and operating an EV, then, like the environmental costs of fuel emissions, such vehicles can save owners tens of thousands of dollars in costs over the span of their ownership—though gas-powered vehicles are still more popular in most markets in part because they’re just more common on car lots, their infrastructure—gas stations versus charging stations—are also more common, and because there are numerous convenience issues, like it being quite a bit faster to pump a tank full of gas than to charge EVs, which is more efficient, but also a piece-of-mind sort of benefit. What I’d like to talk about today are some recent innovations in the EV and especially EV-scale battery space, and what it might mean for this market in the coming years. — After a relatively boom-y period in which EV sales saw a significant uptick, that uptick the consequence of friendly policies and subsidies from successive federal administrations and the rapid-fire innovations arriving in each new generation of EV model being pumped out by US makers, especially Tesla, the US car industry has in recent years pulled back from electric vehicles substantially—the most recent evidence of this being Honda’s recent announcement that three EV models they were planning to manufacture in the US will no longer see production. This was mostly a money decision, the raw and partially manufactured components necessary for US-based car companies to produce EVs are now burdened with new, Trump-era tariffs, that make producing finished products of this kind in the US all but impossible; simply too expensive to make. This is also an acknowledgment, though, that Chinese EVs have just gotten so good and so inexpensive for what you get, that it’s simply not possible to compete, not within the current economic and regulatory climate, but also not in the immediate future, even lacking those tariffs, because of how much of a lead Chinese car companies have earned for themselves in this space. New impositions by the second Trump administration, including those tariffs, but also the killing of EV incentives, and a recent decision to cease enforcing emissions and fuel economy standards, basically telling the industry to make vehicles that pollute more, if they like, have absolutely influenced this state of affairs. But the quality of new Chinese EVs, the speed at which a large quantity of them can be produced, and the affordability of these vehicles is simply too much for even the world’s most otherwise competitive and industry-owning companies, the most renowned car brands, to match. There are a few serious EV players in other parts of Asia, and some US companies, like Lucid Motors, are still trying to carve out a space for themselves, pivoting toward skateboard-style platforms that will allow them to use fewer scarce products, like expensive wiring, by using essentially the same base for all of their models, allowing them to ramp-up efficiencies of scale faster, and Rivian, which is trying to claim the outdoorsy, Jeep-esque facet of the US EV market; and Tesla of course continues to own a lot of mindshare in this industry, despite seeming to be pivoting toward AI, autonomous vehicles, and political concerns in recent years. But this is increasingly China’s domain, and that dominance is the result of a multi-decade push to own basically all the infrastructure and technologies required to electrify their economy, from the ground-up. As a consequence of that dominance, and all the renewables and battery-making facilities and investments in the relevant companies made by the government for the past few decades, we’re now seeing impressive technological feats coming out of China, like the recently successfully test-flown Sky Dragon electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, which looks something like a drone combined with a helicopter, and which can reportedly carry either 10 passengers or a ton of cargo up to 155 miles, which is about 250 kilometers, on a single charge, taking off and landing from helipads, so no runway necessary. But the already on-the-market, everyday applications of this tech are arguably even more impressive, considering that car-markers in other countries cannot accomplish anywhere near the same, and maybe won’t be able to do so for years. Chinese carmaker BYD is the top entrant in this space right now, in China and globally, by many metrics, and in early March of 2026 they announced a new battery, called the Blade Battery 2.0, which allows the vehicles it powers to be driven more than 621 miles on a single charge. That’s compared to the around 400 mile range most large-tanked gas-powered cars can claim. Though even as batteries have gotten larger and more efficient, in terms of their energy storage and expenditure, charging them up has still taken quite a bit longer than filling a tank with gas, often requiring a wait of 30 minutes, though that’s usually just for a small top-up, and only if you have access to a fast-charger. A full-charge sometimes requires as much as 24 hours, if you’re using a small, non-fast public or a home charger. This differs quite a lot depending where in the world you are, the nature of your EV, and the capacity of the charger you’re using. In general, Tesla superchargers can take a Tesla’s battery from 20% to 89% in around 15-30 minutes, which on average provides another 200 miles of travel; topping it up to 100% usually takes about an hour. This new battery from BYD, though, which has that 621 mile capacity, can be charged from 10% to 80% in just 6 and a half minutes—and that’s not theory, that exact feat was shown in a public, onstage demonstration. This isn’t a claim about a technology that will soon arrive, in other words, this is a technology that’s already here, for BYD vehicles, at least. And at six and a half minutes for around 300 miles of range, that brings EVs into the same convenience range as gas vehicles, just a minute or so longer than the average stop at a gas station. This of course will require specialized charging stations, and those stations will take a while to roll out. The company has said they’ll have 15,000 of their so-called megawatt charging stations available across China by the end of 2026, building 4000 of them, themselves, and the rest through joint ventures. They’re also planning to have about 3000 of these chargers built across European by the end of the year. All of which will likely further reinforce and lock-in BYD’s advantages over its local and foreign competition, at least for the next several years. Now, it’s worth mentioning that China’s ’s EV industry is currently a bit tumultuous, the stock prices of companies like BYD tumbling due to wild competition on the Chinese market that until recently has been encouraged by the government, which favors a brutal sort of evolutionary business environment for its favored industries, most of the entrants eventually dying off and leaving fewer, but very strong and internationally competitive companies once the melee has died down. It’s generally assumed that companies like BYD will cope with this crisis of too-low prices and vehicle overproduction—they and their Chinese competitors are making a lot more EVs than their existing markets can bear—they’ll cope by becoming more aggressive with their international expansion, dropping gobs of these incredibly competitive vehicles in more markets, hoping to offload all that stock, but also to suffocate inferior but more expensive local offerings and, consequently, create more lock-in with international customers through those superior products. There’s a parallel push for autonomous EVs in many of these markets, which is several years behind the evolution of EV tech, but is also evolving rapidly within China, using that same ultra-brutal competition tactic. These companies are thus quite a bit further along than most of their global competitors, and it seems likely that the semi-autonomous tech built into these newly exported vehicles will help give Chinese companies a leg-up when it comes to exporting autonomous tech to the world, in the next few years. All of which demonstrates the Chinese market’s major head-start in this and connected technologies, and which points at a serious concern, not just for the US, but for pretty much everyone, as most of these technologies, like better batteries, are relevant not just for the consumer car industry, but also basically every other field, including future military technologies, and tech related to the AI and broader semiconductor industries, which could lead to still-more, and more varied advantages in the near-future. Show Notes https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/01/electric-vehicles-use-half-the-energy-of-gas-powered-vehicles/ https://www.nrdc.org/stories/electric-vs-gas-cars-it-cheaper-drive-ev#lifetime-costs https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/how-do-all-electric-cars-work https://www.energy.gov/cmei/vehicles/articles/fotw-1360-sept-16-2024-typical-ev-87-91-efficient-compared-30-conventional https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/03/facing-heavy-losses-honda-cancels-its-three-us-made-electric-vehicles/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/03/rivian-reveals-pricing-and-trim-details-for-its-r2-suv/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/03/lucid-announces-midsize-ev-platform-says-profitability-lies-with-suvs/ https://www.livescience.com/technology/electric-vehicles/giant-10-person-flying-taxi-passes-first-flight-test-in-china https://www.fastcompany.com/91503415/byd-ev-battery-competes-with-gas-engines https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/03/byds-latest-evs-can-get-close-to-full-charge-in-just-12-minutes/ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/business/china-electric-vehicle-troubles.html https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/how-long-charge-tesla/ This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about Khamenei, Trump, and Netanyahu. We also discuss Venezuela, Cuba, and cartels. Recommended Book: Plagues upon the Earth by Kyle Harper Transcript Ali Hosseini Khamenei was an opposition politician in the lead-up to the Iranian Revolution that, in 1979, resulted in the overthrow of the Shah—the country’s generally Western government-approved royal leader—and installed the Islamic Republic, an extremely conservative Shia government that took the reins of Iran following the Shah’s toppling. Khamenei was Iran’s third president, post-Shah, and he was president during the Iran-Iraq War from 1981-1989, during which the Supreme Leader of Iran, the head of the country, Ruhollah Khomeini sought the overthrow of then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Khomeini died the same year the war ended, 1989, and Khamenei was elected to the role of Supreme Leader by the country’s Assembly of Experts, which is responsible for determining such roles. The new Supreme Leader Khamenei was reportedly initially concerned that he wasn’t suitable for the role, as his predecessor was a Grand Ayatollah of the faith, while he was just a mid-rank cleric, but the constitution of Iran was amended so that higher religious office was no longer required in a Supreme Leader, and in short order Khamenei moved to expound upon Iran’s non-military nuclear program, to expand the use and reach of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in-country and throughout the region, and he doubled-down on supporting regional proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza, incorporating them into the so-called Axis of Resistance that stands against Western interests in the region—the specifics of which have varied over the decades, but which currently includes the aforementioned Hezbollah and Houthis, alongside smaller groups in neighboring countries, like Shiite militias in Bahrain, and forces that operate in other regional spheres of influence, like North Korea, Venezuela, and at times, portions of the Syrian government. Khamenei also reinforced the Iranian government’s power over pretty much every aspect of state function, disempowering political opponents, cracking down on anyone who doesn’t toe a very conservative extremist line—women showing their hair in public, for instance, have been black-bagged and sometimes killed while in custody—and thoroughly entangled the functions of state with the Iranian military, consolidating essentially all power under his office, Supreme Leader, while violently cracking down on anyone who opposed his doing whatever he pleased, as was the case with a wave of late-2025, early 2026 protests across the country, during which Iranian government forces massacred civilians, killing somewhere between 3,000 and 35,000 people, depending on whose numbers you believe. What I’d like to talk about today is a new war with Iran, kicked off by attacks on the country from Israel and the United States that led with the killing of Khamenei and a bunch of his higher-up officers, how this conflict is spreading across the region and concerns about that spreading, and what might happen next. — On February 28, 2026, the US and Israel launched a wave of joint air attacks against Iran, hitting mostly military and government sites across the country. One of the targets was Khamenei’s compound, and his presence there, above-ground, which was unusual for him, as he spent most of his time deep underground in difficult-to-hit bunkers, alongside a bunch of government and military higher-ups, may have been the rationale for launching all of these attacks on that day, as the attackers were able to kill him and five other top-level Iranian leaders, who he was meeting with, at the same time. This wave of attacks followed the largest military buildup of US forces in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq back in 2003, and while military and government targets were prioritized, that initial wave also demolished a lot of civilian structures, including schools, hospitals, and the Grand Bazaar in Tehran, leading to a whole lot of civilian casualties and fatalities, as well. In response, Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, and at US bases throughout the region—these bases located in otherwise uninvolved countries, including Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Iranian missiles and drones also hit non-military targets, and in some cases maybe accidentally hit civilian infrastructure, in Azerbaijan, and Oman, alongside a British military base on the island of Cyprus. The Iranian president apologized in early March for his country’s lashing out at pretty much everyone, saying that there were miscommunications within the Iranian military, and that Iran wouldn’t hit anyone else, including countries with US bases, so long as US attacks didn’t originate from those bases. Despite that apology, though, Iranian missiles and drones continued to land in many of those neighboring countries following his remarks, raising questions about communications and control within the now-decapitated Iranian military. This new conflict follows long-simmering tensions between Iran and Israel—the former of which has said it will someday wipe the latter from the face of the Earth, considering its existence an abomination—and long-simmering tensions related to Iran’s nuclear program, which the government has continuously said is just for civilian, energy purposes, but which pretty much everyone suspects, with a fair bit of evidence, is, in parallel, also a weapons program. Iran’s influence throughout the region has been truncated in recent years, due to a sequence of successes by the Israeli military and intelligence services, which allowed them to hobble or nearly wipe out traditional Iranian proxy forces like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, which have collectively surrounded and menaced Israel for decades. Those menacing forces more or less handled, Israel has become more aggressive in its confrontations with Iran, exchanging large air attacks several times over the past handful of years, and the US under Trump’s second term continues to see Iran as the main opposition to their efforts to build a US-aligned counterbalance against Russian and Chinese influence in the Middle East, with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and increasingly entities like Qatar and the UAE playing ball with the West, while Iran and its allies stand firm against the West. Trump has regularly threatened to act in Iran, usually waiting for the Iranian government to do something really bad, like that recent massacre of civilians following those large anti-government protests in late-2025, early 2026, and that to some degree has served as justification for the massing of US military assets in the region, leading up to this attack. Now that the attack has launched, a new war triggered, the question is how big it will get and how long it will last. For the moment, it looks like Iran’s government and military is very much on the back foot, a lot of their assets taken out in that initial wave, and they’re still scrambling to put someone in charge to replace Khamenei and those other higher-ups who were assassinated at the outset of this war—that’ll likely change soon, maybe even before this episode goes live. But whomever takes the reins will have quite the task ahead of them, probably—according to many analysts, at least—aiming to just hold out until the US runs out of ammunition, which is expected to happen within a week or so, at which point Iran can launch surgical attacks, aiming to make this war too expensive, in terms of money and US lives, for the Trump administration to continue investing in, as money and lives are especially expensive in an election year, which 2026 is. So the idea is to grind the US down until it makes more political sense for Trump to just declare victory and leave, rather than allowing this to become a Vietnam or Afghanistan situation for his administration. It’s also generally expected that when the US pulls out, Israel probably will too, as they’ve already made their point, tallied a bunch of victories, and set Iran back in a lot of ways; they could walk away whenever they like and say they won. And Iran would probably be incentivized to, at that point, avoid doing anything that would lead to more punishment, though they would almost certainly immediately begin rebuilding the same exact centralized, militarized infrastructure that was damaged, the only difference being they would have someone else on top, as the Supreme Leader. Relations could be even worse moving forward, but it would probably be at least a few years before Iran could do anything too significant to their regional enemies, which I guess if you’re Israel does, in fact, represent a win. But considering the unlikelihood of permanent change in Iran, the big question here, in the minds of many, is what this war, this attack, is even for. For Israel, the main purpose of any attack against Iran is to weaken or destroy an enemy that has made no secret about wanting to weaken and destroy them. For the US, though, and the Trump administration more specifically, the point of all this isn’t as clear. Some contend that this is another effort to steal attention and headlines from the increasingly horrifying revelations coming out of the investigation into the Epstein files, which seem to indicate Trump himself was involved in all sorts of horrible, pedophilic sexual assault activities with the late human-trafficker. Some suspect that the apparent victory in grabbing former Venezuelan president Maduro from his own country and whisking him away to the US without suffering any US casualties has emboldened Trump, and that he’s going to use the time he’s got to take out anyone he doesn’t like, and may even specifically target authoritarian leaders who will not be missed—who oppress and kill their own people—because then it’s difficult for his political opponents to call him out on these efforts. Most Venezuelans are happy to see Maduro gone, and many Iranians celebrated when Khamenei was assassinated. Trump has publicly stated that he intends to go after Cuba, next, and continues to suggest he wants a war of sorts with Mexican and south and central American cartels, which follows this same pattern of demonstrating a muscular, aggressive, militarized United States doing whatever it wants, even to the point of kidnapping or assassinating foreign leaders, but doing so in a way that is difficult to argue against, because the leaders and other forces being taken out are so horrible, at times to the point of being monstrous, that these acts, as illegal as they are according to internal laws, can still seem very justified, through some lenses. Still others have said they believe this is purely an Israeli op, and the US under Trump is just helping out one of Trump’s buddies, Israel’s Netanyahu, who wants to keep his country embroiled in war in order to avoid being charged for corruption. The real rationale could be a combination of these and other considerations, but the threat here, regionally, is real, especially if Iran continues to lash out at its neighbors. This part of the world is renowned for its fuel reserves and exports, and every time there’s a Middle Eastern conflict, energy prices rise, globally, and other nations that produce such exports, like Russia, benefit financially because they can charge more for their oil and gas for a while—gas prices in the US have already increased by 14% over the past week as a result of the conflict—and those increases also then the raises the price of all sorts of other goods, spiking inflation. Another huge concern here, though, is that this part of the world is highly reliant on the desalination of water just to survive; massive desalination plants, most located along the coast, where they are very exposed to military threats, are at risk if Iran and Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait, or Oman start firing at each other in earnest. About 90% of Kuwait’s drinking water comes from these sorts of plants, and about 86% of Oman’s and 70% of Saudi Arabia’s do, as well. Earlier in this war, a US strike damaged an Iranian desalination plant, and the Iranian foreign minister made a not-so-veiled threat against such plants in neighboring countries, saying the US set the precedent of attacking such infrastructure, not them. Worth noting here, too, is that many desalination plants are attached to power stations, located within the same facility, so attacks on power infrastructure, which are already common in any conflict, could also lead to more damaged desalination plants, all of which could in turn create massive humanitarian crises, as people living in some of the hottest, driest parts of the world find themselves, in the millions, without drinkable water. The potential for a spiraling humanitarian disaster increases with each passing day, then, which would seem to increase the likelihood that someone will stop, declare victory, and move on to the next conflict. But there’s always the chance the one or more of the involved forces will clamp down and decide that it’s in their best interest to keep things going as long as possible, instead—and in this case, it would likely be Iran playing that role, locking the US and Israel and their allies into a grinding, long-term conflict that no one would actually win. Show Notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_Resistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_state_funeral_of_Ruhollah_Khomeini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khamenei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Ali_Khamenei https://www.eurasiareview.com/08032026-strikes-continue-despite-iranian-presidents-apology/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-rejects-settling-iran-war-raises-prospect-killing-all-its-potential-2026-03-08/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/irans-retaliation-began-us-officials-scrambled-arrange-evacuations-2026-03-07/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/mapping-crisis-iran-visual-explainer-2026-03-06/ https://apnews.com/live/iran-war-israel-trump-03-08-2026 https://apnews.com/article/iran-israel-us-march-8-2026-f0b20dbffaea9351ae1e54183ffe53ff https://apnews.com/article/iran-war-desalination-water-oil-middle-east-12b23f2fa26ed5c4a10f80c4077e61ce https://apnews.com/video/trump-says-us-will-turn-attention-to-cuba-after-war-with-iran-91c3f239c18349fdb409f901c50b7e71 https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03/08/world/iran-war-trump-israel-lebanon https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/08/us/politics/trump-russia-ukraine-iran-war.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/us/politics/iran-war-first-week.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/03/08/opinion/iran-war-ayatollah.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_war This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about Anthropic, the Department of Defense, and OpenAI. We also discuss red lines, contracts, and lethal autonomous systems. Recommended Book: Empire of AI by Karen Hao Transcript Lethal autonomous weapons, often called lethal autonomous systems, autonomous weapons systems, or just ‘killer robots,’ are military hardware that can operate independent of human control, searching for and engaging with targets based on their programming and thus not needing a human being to point it at things or pull the trigger. The specific nature and capabilities of these devices vary substantially from context to content, and even between scholars writing on the subject, but in general these are systems—be they aerial drones, heavy gun emplacements, some kind of mobile rocket launcher, or a human- or dog-shaped robot—that are capable of carrying out tasks and achieving goals without needing constant attention from a human operator. That’s a stark contrast with drones that require either a human controlled or what’s called a human-in-the-loop in order to make decisions. Some drones and other robots and weapons require full hands-on control, with a human steering them, pointing their weapons, and pulling the trigger, while others are semi-autonomous in that they can be told to patrol a given area and look for specific things, but then they reach out to a human-in-the-loop to make final decisions about whatever they want to do, including and especially weapon-related things; a human has to be the one to drop the bomb or fire the gun in most cases, today. Fully autonomous weapon systems, without a human in the loop, are far less common at this point, in part because it’s difficult to create a system so capable that it doesn’t require human intervention at times, but also because it’s truly dangerous to create such a device. Modern artificial intelligence systems are incredibly powerful, but they still make mistakes, and just as an LLM-based chatbot might muddle its words or add extra fingers to a made-up person in an image it generates, or a step further, might fabricate research referenced in a paper it produces, an AI-controlled weapon system might see targets where there are no targets, or might flag a friendly, someone on its side, or a peaceful, noncombatant human, as a target. And if there’s no human-in-the-loop to check the AI’s understanding and correct it, that could mean a lot of non-targets being treated like targets, their lives ended by killer robots that gun them down or launch a missile at their home. On a larger scale, AI systems controlling arrays of weapons, or even entire militaries, becoming strategic commanders, could wipe out all human life by sparking a nuclear war. A recent study conducted at King’s College London found that in simulated crises, across 21 scenarios, AI systems which thought they had control of nation-state-scale militaries opted for nuclear signaling, escalation, and tactical nuclear weapon use 95% of the time, never once across all simulations choosing to use one of the eight de-escalatory options that were made available to them. All of which suggests to the researchers behind this study that the norm, approaching the level of taboo, associated with nuclear weapons use globally since WWII, among humans at least, may not have carried over to these AI systems, and full-blown nuclear conflict may thus become more likely under AI-driven military conditions. What I’d like to talk about today is a recent confrontation between one AI company—Anthropic—and its client, the US Department of Defense, and the seeming implications of both this conflict, and what happened as a result. — In late-2024, the US Department of Defense—which by the way is still the official title, despite the President calling it the Department of War, since only Congress can change its name—the US DoD partnered with Anthropic to get a version of its Claude LLM-based AI model that could be used by the Pentagon. Anthropic worked with Palantir, which is a data-aggregation and surveillance company, basically, run by Peter Thiel and very favored by this administration, and Amazon Web Services, to make that Claude-for-the-US-military relationship happen, those interconnections allowing this version of the model to be used for classified missions. Anthropic received a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense in mid-2025, as did a slew of other US-based AI companies, including Google, xAI, and OpenAI. But while the Pentagon has been funding a bunch of US-based AI companies for this utility, only Claude was reportedly used during the early 2026 raid on Venezuela, during which now-former Venezuelan President Maduro was taken by US forces. Word on the street is that Claude is the only model that the Pentagon has found truly useful for these sorts of operations, though publicly they’re saying that investments in all of these models have borne fruit, at least to some degree. So Anthropic’s Claude model is being used for classified, military and intelligence purposes by the US government. Anthropic has been happy about this, by all accounts, because that’s a fair bit of money, but also being used for these purposes by a government is a pretty big deal—if it’s good enough for the US military, after all, many CEOs will see that as a strong indication that Claude is definitely good enough for their intended business purposes. On February 24 of 2026, though, the US Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, threatened to remove Anthropic from the DoD’s stable of AI systems that they use unless the company allowed the DoD to use Claude for any and all legal purposes—unrestricted use of the model, basically. This threat came with a timeline—accede to these demands by February 27 or be cut from the DoD’s supply chain—and the day before that deadline, the 26th, Anthropic’s CEO released a statement indicating that the company would not get rid of its red lines that delineated what Claude could and could not be used for, and on the 27th, US President Trump ordered that all US agencies stop using Anthropic tools, and said that he would declare the company a supply chain risk, which would make it illegal for any company doing business with the US government at any level and in any fashion to use Anthropic products or services—a label that’s rarely used, and which was previously used by the Trump administration against Chinese tech giant Huawei on the basis that the company might insert spy equipment in communications hardware installed across the US if they were allowed to continue operating in the country. Those red lines that Anthropic’s CEO said he wouldn’t get rid of, not even for a client as big and important as the US government, and not even in the face of threats by Hegseth, including that he might invoke the Defense Production Act, which would allow him to force the company to allow the Pentagon to use Claude however they like, or Trumps threat that the company be blacklisted from not just the government, but from working with a significant chunk of Fortune 500 companies, those red lines include not allowing Claude to be used for controlling autonomous weapon systems, killer robots, basically, and not allowing Claude to be used for surveilling US citizens. The Pentagon signed a contract with Anthropic in which they agreed to these terms, but Hegseth’s new demand was that Anthropic sign a new version of the contract in which they allow the US government to use Claude and their other offerings for ‘all legal purposes,’ which apparently includes, at least in some cases and contexts, killer robots and mass surveillance. So the Pentagon tried to strong-arm a US-based AI company into allowing them to use their product for purposes the company doesn’t consider to be moral, and that led to this situation in which Anthropic is now being phased out from US government use—it’ll apparently take about 6 months to do this, and some analysts speculate that timeline is meant to serve as a period in which further negotiation can occur—but either way, it’s being phased out and it may even have trouble getting major clients in the future as a result of being blackballed. As all this was happening, OpenAI stepped in and offered its products and services to fill the void left by Anthropic in the US government. OpenAI’s CEO has been cozying up to Trump a lot since he regained office, and has positioned the company as a major US asset, too big to fail because then China will win the AI race, basically, so this makes sense. Its CEO released several statements and press releases in the wake of this further cozying, saying that they believe the same things Anthropic does, and that they’re not giving up any credibility for doing this because they have the same red lines, no killer robots, no mass surveillance of US citizens. But this is generally assumed to be bunk, because why would the Pentagon agree to the same terms all over again, and with a company that provides, for their purposes and right now, anyway, inferior services instead of the one they just chased out and blackballed, and which was helping them do purposeful, effective things, like kidnapping a foreign leader from a secure facility, today? Instead, what it sounds like is OpenAI is trying to have its cake and eat it too, saying publicly that they don’t want their offerings used to control autonomous weapons systems or mass surveil Americans, but instead of writing that into the contract, they’ve got some basic guardrails baked into their systems, and they are assuming those guardrails will keep any funny business from happening. So it’s a sort of gentleman’s agreement with their clients that OpenAI products won’t be used for mass surveillance or killer robots, rather than something legally binding, as was the case with Anthropic. The response to all this within the tech world has been illustrative of what we might expect in the coming years. Many people, including folks working on these technologies, are halting their use of OpenAI tech in protest, and in some (at this point at least) fewer cases, people are quitting their OpenAI jobs, because they are strongly opposed to these use-cases and would prefer to support a company that takes a strong stand on these sorts of moral issues. Some analysts also wonder if this will ensure the Pentagon only ever has access to inferior AI models because they intentionally threatened and disempowered a key AI industry CEO in public, saying that they had final say over how these tools are used, and many such CEOs are both unaccustomed to such stripping down, but are also doing the work they’re doing for ideological reasons—they have beliefs about what the future, as enabled by AI technologies, will look like, and they believe they will play a vital role in making that future happen. The idea, then, is why would they want to work with the Pentagon, or the US government more broadly, if that means no longer being in charge of the destiny of these tools they’re putting so much time, effort, and resources into building? Why would they take on a client, even a big, important one, if that means no longer having any grain of control over the future of the world as shaped by the systems they’re building? We’ll know a bit more about how all this plays out within the next handful of months, as this could serve as a moral differentiator between otherwise near-match products in the AI category, allowing companies like Anthropic to compete, both in terms of clients and in terms of employees, with the likes of OpenAI and xAI by saying, look, we don’t want killer robots or mass surveillance and we gave up a LOT, put our money where our mouths are, in support of that moral stance. That could prove to be a serious feather in their cap, despite the initial cost, though it could also be that the pressure the US government is willing and able to apply to them instead serves as a warning to others, and the likes of OpenAI and Google and so on just get better at speaking out of both sides of their mouths on this issue, creating sneakier contracts that allow them to say the same on paper, seeming to take the same moral stance Anthropic did, while behind closed doors allowing their clients to do basically whatever they want with their products, including using them to control killer robots and to mass surveil US citizens. Show Notes https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/artificial-intelligence-under-nuclear-pressure-first-large-scale-kings-study-reveals-how-ai-models-reason-and-escalate-under-crisis https://www.axios.com/2026/02/26/ai-nuclear-weapons-war-pentagon-scenarios https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/technology/openai-agreement-pentagon-ai.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_autonomous_weapon https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/885963/anthropic-dod-pentagon-tech-workers-ai-labs-react https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/886816/openai-reached-a-new-agreement-with-the-pentagon https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/trump-moves-to-ban-anthropic-from-the-us-government/ https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-pentagon-ai-dario-amodei-hegseth-0c464a054359b9fdc80cf18b0d4f690c https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/whats-really-at-stake-in-the-fight-between-anthropic-and-the-pentagon-d450c1a1 https://openai.com/index/our-agreement-with-the-department-of-war/ https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/artificial-intelligence-under-nuclear-pressure-first-large-scale-kings-study-reveals-how-ai-models-reason-and-escalate-under-crisis https://www.axios.com/2026/02/26/ai-nuclear-weapons-war-pentagon-scenarios This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about Trump’s tariffs, the Supreme Court, and negotiating leverage. We also discuss trade wars, Greenland, and the IEEPA. Recommended Book: Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh Transcript I’ve spoken on this show before about tariffs and about US President Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs as an underpinning of his trade policy. Last October, back in 2025 I did an episode on tariff leverage and why the concept of an ongoing trade war is so appealing to Trump—it basically gives him a large whammy on anyone he enters negotiations with, because the US market is massive and everyone wants access to it, and tariffs allow him to bring the hammer down on anyone he doesn’t like, or who doesn’t kowtow in what he deems to be an appropriate manner. So he can slap a large tariff on steel or pharmaceuticals or cars from whichever country he likes just before he enters negotiations with that country, and then those negotiations open with him in an advantageous spot: they have to give him things just to get those tariffs to go away—they have to negotiate just to get things back to square one. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. What we talked about a bit back in October is TACO theory, TACO standing for Trump Always Chickens Out—the idea is that other world leaders had gotten wise to Trump’s strategy, which hasn’t changed since his first administration, and he has mostly been a doubling-down on that one, primary approach, to the point that they can step into these negotiations, come up with something to give him that allows him to claim that he’s won, to make it look like he negotiated well, and then they get things back down to a more reasonable level; maybe not square one, but not anything world-ending, and not anything they weren’t prepared and happy to give up. In some cases, though, instead of kowtowing in this way so that Trump can claim a victory, whether or not a victory was actually tallied, some countries and industries and the businesses that make up those industries have simply packed up their ball and gone home. China has long served as a counterbalance to the US in terms of being a desirable market and a hugely influential player across basically every aspect of geopolitics and the global economy, and this oppositional, antagonistic approach to trade has made the US less appealing as a trade partner, and China more appealing in comparison. So some of these entities have negotiated to a level where they could still ship their stuff to the US and US citizens would still be willing to pay what amounts to an extra tax on all these goods, because that’s how tariffs work, that fee is paid by the consumers, not by the businesses or the origin countries, but others have given up and redirected their goods to other places. And while that’s a big lift sometimes, the persistence of this aggression and antagonism has made it a worthwhile investment for many of these entities, because the US has become so unpredictable and unreliable that it’s just not worth the headache anymore. What I’d like to talk about today is a recent Supreme Court decision related to Trump’s tariffs, and what looks likely to happen next, in the wake of that ruling. — Ever since Trump stepped back into office for his second term, in January of 2025, he has aggressively instilled new and ever-growing tariffs on basically everyone, but on some of the US’s most important trade partners, like Mexico and Canada, in particular. These tariffs have varied and compounded, and they’ve applied to strategic goods that many US presidents have tried to hobble in various ways, favoring US-made versions of steel and microchips, for instance, so that local makers of these things have an advantage over their foreign-made alternatives, or have a more balanced shot against alternatives made in parts of the world where labor is cheaper and standards are different. But this new wave of tariffs were broad based, hitting everyone to some degree, and that pain was often taken away, at least a little, after leaders kowtowed, at times even giving him literal gold-plated gifts in order to curry favor, and/or funneling money into his family’s private companies and other interests, allowing him to use these tariffs as leverage for personal gain, not just national advantage, in other cases giving him what at least looked outwardly to be a negotiating win. Things spiraled pretty quickly by mid-2025, when China pushed back against these tariffs, adding their own reciprocal tariffs on US goods, and at one point extra duties on Chinese imports coming into the US hit 145%. Shortly thereafter, though, and here we see that TACO acronym proving true, once again, Trump agreed to slash these tariffs for 90 days, and around the same time, in May of 2025, a federal appeals court temporarily reinstated some of Trump’s largest-scale tariffs after a lower court ruled that they couldn’t persist. The remainder of 2025 was a story of Trump trying to strike individual deals with a bunch of trade partners, like South Korea, Indonesia, and India, in some cases via direct negotiation, in others with a bunch of threats that eventually led to a sort of mutual standoff that no one was particularly happy about. 2026 was greeted with a threat by Trump to impose a huge wave of new tariffs on eight major European allies, those tariffs sticking around until these nations agreed to allow the US to buy Greenland, which was an obsession of Trump’s at that point, but a lot of Trump’s tariff posturing was derailed by a Supreme Court decision that landed in mid-February, in which the justices decided, 6 to 3, that Trump’s reciprocal tariffs are unconstitutional, as setting and changing tariffs is a Congressional power, not a Presidential one. This was a serious blow to Trump and his stated policies, as pretty much all of his economic plans oriented around the idea—which most economists have said is bunk and based on fantasy, not reality, but still—that putting a bunch of tariffs on everything will allow the US to earn so much additional revenue that the deficit can be paid down. It’s worth noting here that, just as those economists predicted, the deficit has only gotten larger under both Trump administrations, and in fact the growth of the US debt has sped up, not declined, despite the additional billions being pulled into government coffers by these tariffs, because the Trump administration’s spending is massive, and because the losses related to tariffs are also significant. But tariffs remain center to his policy nonetheless, so this was a major blow. This ruling also seemed likely to defang a lot of Trump’s threats and drain his leverage at the negotiating table, as he could no longer threaten everyone with more tariffs, practically booting them from or weakening them on the US market. So Trump was pissed, and as he tends to do, he publicly raged about the decision, which was made by a Supreme Court that is heavily stacked in his favor; which gives an indication of just how unpopular and unconstitutional all of this has been. But immediately after that decision landed, he announced that, using alternative authorities—different powers—he would be imposing a blanket 10% tariff on everything coming into the US, and the following day announced that it would be a 15% tariff on everything, instead. This does seem to be something Trump has the power to do, but he can only do it under the auspices of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, and these tariffs will only last for 150 days, max, and might also be challenged in court. Also notably, some entities, like Britain and Australia, will face higher rates than they faced under the previous tariff setup, because of how they are applied and compound with other trade barriers, or the nature of what they export to the US market, while others, including China, will see their tariffs substantially drop. Which could make things tricky, as that implies some of the previously negotiated deals have changed post-deal, or in some cases mid-negotiation; which means a lot more work to get things where everyone wants them, but also a loss of legitimacy and credibility for this administration, as they seem to be negotiating using powers they don’t actually have and making promises they can’t keep. All of which, rather than simplifying and clarifying things for the US market and our international trade partners, actually further complicates them, at least for now, until the dust settles. It does seem likely Trump’s administration will continue to try to leverage whatever power they can in this matter, grabbing at levers that haven’t been previously used, or used in this way, and those attempts will almost certainly be legally challenged, which could lead to more court cases, and a lot more uncertainty in the meantime, until those cases are figured it. It’s also created new rifts within the Republican party, as Trump seems to be going after those who voted against his tariffs, or in any other way supported their removal, and he’s raged against the Supreme Court justices, even those he put into place and who are ideologically aligned with the Republican party almost always, which could also lead to more fracturing within his base, leading up to the November 2026 Congressional elections. One more thing that’s worth noting here is that Trump’s usual tactic of trying to distract from things he doesn’t want people to pay attention to is in full operation following this court case: as all this has been happening, and against the backdrop of increasingly serious allegations related to his abundant presence in the Epstein files, he’s been talking more about potentially attacking Iran and releasing files on aliens, on extraterrestrials on Earth and in the US. So we’re likely to see a lot more of that sort of thing in the coming months, especially if things continue to not go his way in regards to these tariffs and the hubbub surrounding them, but this story will shape global and US economics for years to come, not to mention on-the-ground realities for many people today, which should substantially impact Trump’s popularity and voter behavior come November. Show Notes https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/supreme-court-trump-energy-tariffs https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/trump-tariff-plan-section-122-trade-act https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/trump-scotus-tariff-refund-battle https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/business/economy/trump-tariffs-trade-war.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/22/business/trump-tariffs-japan-indonesia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/us/politics/supreme-court-trump-tariffs-takeaways.html https://apnews.com/live/supreme-court-tariff-ruling-updates https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c0l9r67drg7t https://heatmap.news/economy/clean-energy-tariff-ruling https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/20/us/trump-tariffs-supreme-court https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/supreme-court-blocks-trumps-emergency-tariffs-billions-in-refunds-may-be-owed/ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/20/what-will-happen-to-trump-tariffs-after-supreme-court-verdict https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/business/economy/tariffs-supreme-court-global-busines-reaction.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/business/trump-deminimis-loophole-closed.html https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am-5b34aa80-2020-453a-bef1-8cf648e9b3c3.html https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/trump-tariff-plan-section-122-trade-act https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/supreme-court-strikes-down-tariffs/ https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-supreme-court-tariffs-ieepa-john-roberts-brett-kavanaugh-90daf559 https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/us/politics/supreme-court-tariffs-conservatives.html https://www.wsj.com/economy/u-s-manufacturing-is-in-retreat-and-trumps-tariffs-arent-helping-d2af4316 https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-scotus-ruling-update https://www.kielinstitut.de/fileadmin/Dateiverwaltung/IfW-Publications/fis-import/92fb3f30-07b8-4dcf-b2bc-fbefb831f1a1-KPB201_EN.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/02/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-imposes-a-temporary-import-duty-to-address-fundamental-international-payment-problems/ https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/tariff-refunds-supreme-court-trump-rcna259968 https://www.wsj.com/opinion/its-the-end-of-the-beginning-of-the-tariff-war-88a08d37 https://www.axios.com/2026/02/21/trump-tariff-supreme-court-increase https://www.axios.com/2026/02/21/alien-files-conspiracy-theories-usa This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about mass surveillance, smart doorbells, and the Patriot Stack. We also discuss Amazon, Alexa, and the Super Bowl. Recommended Book: Red Moon by Benjamin Percy Transcript In 2002, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the US government created a new agency—the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, operating under the auspices of the US Department of Homeland Security, which was also formed that year for the same general reason, to defend against 9/11-style attacks in the future. As with a whole lot of what was done in the years following the 9/11 attacks, a lot of what this agency, and its larger department did could be construed as a sort of overcompensation by a government and a people who were reeling from the first real, large-scale attack within their borders from a foreign entity in a very long time. It was a horrific event, everyone felt very vulnerable and scared, and consequently the US government could do a lot of things that typically would not have had the public’s support, like rewiring how airports and flying works in the country, creating all sorts of new hurdles and imposing layers of what’s often called security theater, to make people feel safe. While the TSA was meant to handle things on the front-lines of air transportation, though, X-raying and patting-down and creating a significant new friction for everyone wanting to get on a plane, ICE was meant to address another purported issue: that of people coming into the US from elsewhere, illegally, and then sticking around long enough to cause trouble. More specifically, ICE was meant to help improve public safety by strictly enforcing at times lax immigration laws, by tracking down and expelling illegal immigrants from the country; the theory being that some would-be terrorists may have snuck into the US and might be getting ready to kill US citizens from within our own borders. There’s not a lot of evidence to support that assertion—the vast majority of terrorism that happens in the US is conducted by citizens, mostly those adhering to a far-right or other extremist ideologies. But that hasn’t moved the needle on public perception of the issue, which still predominantly leans toward stricter border controls and more assiduous moderation of non-citizens within US borders—for all sorts of reasons, not just security ones. What I’d like to talk about today is an offshoot of the war on terror and this vigilance about immigrants in the US, and how during the second Trump administration, tech companies have been entangling themselves with immigration-enforcement agencies like ICE to create sophisticated surveillance networks. — In mid-July of 2025, the US Department of Defense signed one of its largest contracts in its history with a tech company called Palantir Technologies. Palantir was founded and is run by billionaire Peter Thiel, who among other things is generally considered to be the reason JD Vance was chosen to be Trump’s second-term Vice President. He’s also generally considered to be one of, if not the main figure behind the so-called Patriot Tech movement, which consists of companies like SpaceX, Anduril, and OpenAI, all of which are connected by a web of funding arms and people who have cross-pollinated between major US tech companies and US agencies, in many cases stepping into government positions that put them in charge of the regulatory bodies that set the rules for the industries in which they worked. As a consequence of this setup and this cross-pollination, the US government now has a bunch of contracts with these entities, which has been good for the companies’ bottom lines and led to reduced government regulations, and in exchange the companies are increasingly cozy with the government and its many agencies, toeing the line more than they would have previously, and offering a lot more cooperation and collaboration with the government, as well. This is especially true when it comes to data collection and surveillance, and a great deal of that sort of information and media is funneled into entities like Palantir, which aggregate and crunch it for meaning, and then send predictions and assumptions, and make services like facial-recognition technologies predicated on their vast database, available to police and ICE agents, among others such entities. There has been increasingly stiff pushback against this melding of the tech world with the government—which has always been there to some degree, but which has become even more entwined than usual, of late—and that pushback is international, even long-time allies like Canada and the EU making moves to develop their own replacements for Amazon and Google and OpenAI due to these issues, and the heightened unpredictability and chaos of the US in recent years, but it’s also evident within the US, due in part to Trump’s moves while in office, but also the on-the-ground realities in places like Minneapolis, where ICE agents have been brutalizing and blackbagging people, sometimes illegal immigrants, sometimes US citizens, usually non-white US citizens, and the ICE agents are being rewarded, getting bonuses, for beating up and kidnapping and in some cases murdering people, whether or not any of these people are actually criminals—and it’s illegal to do that kind of thing even if they are criminals, by the way. All of which sets the scene for what happened following the Super Bowl, this year. Ring is a home security and smart home device company that is best known for its line of smart doorbells, but which also makes all sorts of security cameras and other alarm system devices. Even though smart doorbells, complete with cameras and other sorts of functionality, existed before Ring, this company basically created the smart doorbell industry as it exists today back in 2014, when it received a round of equity investment and changed its named from Doorbot to Ring. It was bought by Amazon four years later, in 2018, for a billion dollars. One of Ring’s premier features is related to its camera: you can use your phone or other smart home device to see who’s at your door when they ring the bell, but it can also be set to record when it detects movement, which makes it easy to check and see who stole your Amazon package from your porch when you weren’t at home, for instance, and resultingly Ring door camera footage has become fundamental to reporting, and on occasion pursuing, some types of crime. As a direct result of that utility, Ring introduced its Neighbors service in mid-2018, this service serving as a sort of social network that allows Ring device users to discuss local issues, especially those related to safety and security, anonymously, while also allowing them to share photos and videos taken by their devices. This service also created relationships with local law enforcement, and allowed police to jump onto the network and request footage from Ring customers, if they thought these doorbell cams might have photos or video of someone escaping with a stolen car, for instance, which might then help the police catch that crook. It’s generally assumed that Amazon probably bought Ring, at least in part, to entrench itself as the lord of the internet of things world, as it launched its Amazon Sidewalk platform in 2020, which allowed all Amazon devices, including Ring devices, to share a wireless mesh network, all of them communicating with each other and all using Amazon’s Alexa as an interface. In 2023, Ring was sued by the FTC for $5.8 million because it allowed its employees and contractors to access private videos by failing to have basic security and privacy features in place—so not only could any Ring employee view their customer’s private video feeds, hackers could easily access all this media and data, as well. Just one example surfaced in that lawsuit shows that a Ring employee viewed thousands of video recordings of at least 81 different female users over the course of a few months in 2017. So Amazon was building a surveillance network that worked really well, in the sense that it was predicated on popular, at times quite useful devices that people seemed to love, but which was also quite leaky, giving all sorts of people access to these supposedly private feeds, and it was shared with law enforcement via that social network. It’s also been alleged that Ring (and Amazon) have used users’ footage without further permission for things like facial recognition and AI training. Their partnership with police agencies also allegedly created incentives for the police to encourage citizens to buy Ring cams and other security devices for their homes, creating perverse incentives. And again, these devices connect wirelessly to other internet of things devices, expanding their reach and the potential for abuse of collected user data. In late 2025, Ring announced a new partnership with Flock Safety, a company that’s best known for its security offerings, including automated license plate readers and gunshot detector systems. These are mass surveillance tools used by some governments and law enforcement entities, and they use cameras and microphones to capture license plates, people’s faces, and sounds that might be gunfire and aggregate that data to be used by police, neighborhood associations, and in some cases private property owners. This sort of technology is incredibly useful to companies like Palantir, which again, aggregates and crunches it, on scale, and then shares that information with police, ICE, and other such agencies. These tools can sometimes help flag areas where guns are being fired or where crimes are being committed, but they’re also imperfect and at times biased against some groups of people and areas, and some data show that not only is crime not reduced by the presence of these systems, but there’s a fair bit of evidence that this data often falls into the hands of hackers or is used by employees for nefarious, stalkery purposes, as was the case with Ring’s cameras. So most civil liberties groups, like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are vehemently against them, but governments like the second Trump administration like them, because they create a surveillance mesh they can tap into and use for, for instance, figuring out where to deploy ICE agents, or, in theory at least, spying on your political enemies or ex-spouses for abuse or blackmail purposes. Ring’s late-2025 announcement wasn’t widely reported, but in early 2026 the company bought a Super Bowl ad to announce a new feature called Search Party, enabled by their partnership with Flock. The ad showed a neighborhood coming together to find a lost dog, using the web of doorbell cameras on all the homes in the area to track the dog and figure out where it went—all the cameras activated at once to create a surveillance mesh of live footage. This ad landed with a resounding thud,, as to many people it felt more menacing than heartwarming, the new feature overtly raising the potential that government agencies, including ICE, could tap into it to surveil and track their neighbors. The response was so negative that Ring quickly issued a statement saying that it was no longer moving forward with its Flock partnership, attempting to reassure its customers that “integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever send to Flock Safety.” This result is notable in part because it’s a rare instance of a major tech company backtracking on a major feature decision due to public backlash, but also because it suggests backlash against ICE is reverberating through other aspects of life and interconnected industries. Ring device users mostly buy these things for their surveillance capabilities, but the increasing, and increasingly hostile and violent acts committed by members of ICE seem to have nudged the conversation so that folks are more worried about these agents than about the porch pirates and other criminals that these devices and this partnership could ostensibly help them identify. It’s too early to say what this might mean for the burgeoning patriot stack of tech companies and government agencies, but it does suggest there are limits to what people will put up with, even when those in charge are adhering to a playbook that has typically worked well for them, in the past, and the devices and services they’re using to build their surveillance network are otherwise beloved by those who use them. Show Notes https://restofworld.org/2026/big-tech-backlash-alternatives-upscrolled/ https://europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/trumps-power-switch https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/realestate/smart-home-cameras-nest-ring-privacy.html https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/platforms-bend-over-backward-to-help-dhs-censor-ice-critics-advocates-say/ https://www.theverge.com/report/879320/ring-flock-partnership-breakup-does-not-fix-problems https://www.theverge.com/news/878447/ring-flock-partnership-canceled https://www.404media.co/with-ring-american-consumers-built-a-surveillance-dragnet/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/children-of-color-projected-to-be-majority-of-u-s-youth-this-year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_Safety https://www.wired.com/story/ice-expansion-across-us-at-heres-where-its-going-next/ https://www.wired.com/story/social-security-administration-appointment-details-ice/ https://www.wired.com/story/security-news-this-week-ring-kills-flock-safety-deal-after-super-bowl-ad-uproar/ https://www.wired.com/story/ice-crashing-us-court-system-minnesota/ https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-ceo-alex-karp-employee-questions-on-ice/ https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-ice-forum-where-agents-complain-about-their-jobs/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

This week we talk about the European Union, India, and tariffs. We also discuss trade barriers, free trade, and dumping. Recommended Book: The Kill Chain by Christian Brose Transcript A free trade agreement, sometimes called a free trade treaty, is a law that reduces the cost and regulatory burden of trading between two or more states. There are many theories as to the ideal way to do international trade, with some economists and politicians positing that complete free and open trade is the way to go, because it allows goods and services to cross borders completely unencumbered, which in turn allows businesses in different countries to really lean into whatever they’re good at, selling their cars to countries that are less good at making cars, while that recipient country produces soy beans or computer chips or whatever they’re good at making, and sending those in the other direction, likewise unburdened by stiff tariffs or regulatory hurdles. Each country can thus produce the best product cheapest and sell it to the market where their products are in high-demand, while they, in turn, benefit from the same when it comes to other products and services. This theory leans on the idea that everyone is better off when everyone does what they’re best at, rather than trying to do everything—specialization. But those who oppose this conception of international trade argue that this creates and reinforces asymmetries between different nations and businesses: a country that’s really good at producing soybeans may be at a substantial disadvantage if the country that makes cars ever decides to go to war, because they won’t have the existing infrastructure to build tanks or drones or whatever else, while the country that specializes in computer chips might hold all the cards when it comes to generating economic pressure against its enemies or would-be enemies, because such chips are in everything these days, from military hardware to kitchen appliances. This also creates potential frailties for countries that specialize in, say, buggy whips, only to have a new technology like the automobile come around and put a significant chunk of their total economy out of business. This theory may also leave local businesses that don’t lean into a regional strength kind of in the lurch. If a country with a decent-sized automobile industry decides leaves their borders completely open to international competition, there’s a chance that could light a fire under those local producers, forcing them to become more competitive, but there’s also a chance it could collapse the market for local offerings—their cars might no longer be desirable, because the international stuff flooding across the borders from a nation that has heavily prioritized making cars are just so much better and cheaper, whether naturally or artificially, because of subsidies by that foreign government meant to help them take out international competition. This is why most nations have all sorts of tariffs, regulations, and other trade barriers erected between them and their trading partners, and why those trade barriers are ultra-specific, different for every single possible trade partner. The goal is to make international options less appealing by making them more expensive, or making it trickier for foreign competition to smoothly and quickly get their products on your shelves, while still making those things available in a volume that aligns with local consumer demands. And then ideally making it easier and cheaper for your stuff to get on their shelves. The negotiation of all this is massively complicated because Country A might want to favor their soybean farmers, who are an important voting bloc, and Country B might want to do the same for their car industry, because tax income from that industry is vital, and these two governments will thus do what they can to ensure their favored local industries and businesses have the biggest leg-up possible in as many foreign markets as possible, without giving away so much to their trade partners that they create worse situations for other industries and businesses (and the people who run them) on the home-front, as a consequence. What I’d like to talk about today is a recent, massive and potentially quite vital trade deal that was struck in early 2026, and what it might mean for global trade. — At the tail-end of January 2026, the European Commission announced that they had struck what they called “the mother of all deals” with India, this deal the culmination of two decades worth of negotiation, its tenets impacting about 2 billion people and around a quarter of the world’s total GDP. The agreement, as is the case with most such agreements, is fairly complex. But in essence it reduces or eliminates tariffs on 96.6% of all EU goods exported to India, which means about 4 billion euros of annual duties that would have otherwise been paid on European products in India will disappear—a savings for Indian consumers, and a boon for European producers whose products will now be cheaper in India. This is expected to be especially beneficial for European automakers like Volkswagen, Renault, and BMW, which have long been weighed down by a 110% tariff in India; that tariff will be reduced to as little as 10% on the first 250,000 vehicles sold, following this agreement. Lower priced vehicles will still face higher tariffs, to help protect India’s local carmakers, but electric vehicles will benefit from a five-year grace period, as India has been focusing on allowing as many cheap, renewable energy assets and infrastructure into the country as possible, regardless of where they come from. Tariffs on machinery, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals coming from the EU will be almost entirely eliminated, down from tariff rates of 44, 22, and 11%, respectively. Wine, which has long been tariffed at a rate of 150%, will be cut to between 20-30% for many varieties, and spirits from the EU coming into India will see 150% tariffs cut to 40%. On the other side of this deal, the EU will also open its market to Indian goods, reducing tariffs on about 99.5% of all such goods, including seafood, textiles, gems and jewelry, leather goods, plastic products, and toys. Several of these categories, like Indian seafood, textile-making, and other labor-intensive industries, have had a rough time of late, because of high US tariffs enforced by President Trump’s second administration, so this is being seen as a significant win for them in particular. Interestingly, while the reduction in trade barriers is substantial here, and the number of people and industries, and amount of money that’s involved is massive, this deal doesn’t include, and in some cases explicitly excludes, any agreements related to labor rights, climate commitment, or environmental standards. This means that while the European Union has thus far been pretty strict in terms of ensuring incoming products align with their policies and values regarding things like carbon emissions and ensuring goods aren’t produced by people laboring in slave-like conditions, this deal falls short of such enforcements, allowing India to operate with relative impunity, with regards to those issues, at least, and still sell with dramatically reduced barriers, on the European market. That’s a big deal, and is perhaps the biggest indicator of just how badly the EU wanted to make this deal work. The EU was also able to keep significant protections in place for important local sectors like beef and chicken, dairy, rice, and sugar—all industries in which India would have liked to compete in the EU, but which, because of those maintained barriers, they practically can’t. That would likely have been a feverishly negotiated topic, and it’s likely an indicator of how much India wanted this to work, too. On that note, both India and the EU were apparently especially interested in making this multi-decade deal work, now, because of increasing pressure from China on one side and the US on the other. China has been rerouting many of its cheap products that would have previously gone to the US market, elsewhere, engaging in what’s often called ‘dumping’ which slowly but surely puts businesses that produce comparable products at a profit in those local target markets out of business, at which point these Chinese companies can then ratchet up their prices and profits, operating without real competition. The EU and India have both been targeted by Chinese companies taking this approach, because they’re still producing at a feverish pace and because of US tariffs and the general unpredictability and irregularity of US policy overall under the second Trump administration, they’ve been firing that cheap product cannon more intensely at other large markets, instead—and India and the EU are the next two big markets in line right now, after the US and China. On the US side of things, those same tariffs have been hurting companies in both the EU and India that would otherwise been shipping their goods to the rich and spendy US market, and in many cases these tariffs have been fine-tuned to hurt important local industries as much as possible, because that’s one of Trump’s main negotiating tactics: lead with pain and then negotiate to take some of the pain away. This deal, then, serves multiple purposes in that it creates a valuable, newly polished trade relationship between a rich and powerful existing bloc and the newly most-populous country on the planet, which is also rapidly expanding economically and geopolitically. One last point to note, here, though, is that the European Union has been trying to create these sorts of mutually beneficial deals with non-US partners for a while, now, and the two most recent wins, trade deals with a South American trade bloc and with Indonesia, in early January 2026 and in September of 2025, respectively, have borne mixed results. The deal with Indonesia seems to be moving forward apace, and while it’s a heck of a lot smaller than the India deal, only worth about 27 billion euros, that’s still important, as Indonesia is increasingly important, both economically and geopolitically, especially in a Southeast Asia that’s slowly reinforcing itself against China’s economically and potentially militarily expansionist tendencies. The deal with that South American bloc, however, was referred to the EU Court of Justice in mid-January for legal review due to its lack of alignment with other EU treaties, and that could delay or prevent its ratification. This new mother of all deals with India could likewise face holdups, or could fizzle before being implemented—though most analysts who are keeping eyes on this are seeing it not just as an economic agreement, but a gesture of solidarity at a moment in which China and the US are signaling their intent to carve up the world into hemispheric hegemonies, when those who might otherwise be forced into subordinate positions are scrambling to figure out who they can team up with and create counter-balancing forces capable of standing up against current and future aggression and coercion. There’s a chance that even if politics and propriety threaten to get in the way, then, India and the EU will figure out a way to work together, on this and potentially other matters of global import, as well. Show Notes https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/27/eu-and-india-sign-free-trade-agreement https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/eu-india-trade-deal-leaves-blocs-carbon-border-tariff-intact-2026-01-27/ https://archive.is/20260127162349/https://www.ft.com/content/b03b1344-7e92-4d0d-b85e-5ed92fc8f550 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade_agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_barrier https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_184 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/document/print/en/ip_26_184/IP_26_184_EN.pdf https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/how-indias-mother-of-all-deals-with-eu-wipes-out-pakistans-trade-advantage-10921011 https://theconversation.com/what-the-mother-of-all-deals-between-india-and-the-eu-means-for-global-trade-274515 https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/economic-impact-us-tariff-hikes-significance-trade-diversion-effects https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20260116IPR32450/eu-mercosur-meps-demand-a-legal-opinion-on-its-conformity-with-the-eu-treaties https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/1/27/mother-of-all-deals-how-india-eu-trade-deal-creates-27-trillion-market https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/27/trump-reaction-eu-india-trade-deal-fta.html https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/inflection-points/the-mother-of-all-trade-deals-in-the-time-of-trump/ https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/foreign-trade/with-mother-of-all-deals-in-bag-minister-piyush-goyal-says-mother-will-be-compassionate-fair-to-all-28-children/articleshow/127821015.cms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93European_Union_Free_Trade_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93European_Union_relations This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about social networks, propaganda, and Oracle. We also discuss foreign adversaries, ByteDance, and X. Recommended Book: Rewiring Democracy by Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders Transcript In 2021, TikTok, a short-form video platform that’s ostensibly also a social network, though which leans heavily toward consuming content over socializing, was ranked the most popular website by internet services company Cloudflare, beating out all the other big tech players, including search engine juggernaut, Google. It was a neck and neck sort of thing, with Google taking the lead some days that year, but 2021 was definitely TikTok’s time to shine, as it was already popular with young people and was starting to become popular with the general public, of all ages and across a huge swathe of the planet. It even beat Facebook as the most popular social media website that year, despite, again, being mostly about consuming content rather than interacting—that was actually a prime motivator for Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to redirect its own apps in a similar direction, shifting its focus from communication and interaction between users toward the creation of binge-able content, and feeding users more of that content in a feed optimized for time-losing levels of consumption. 2021 was also the first full year that TikTok was coming under scrutiny from the US government. In the preceding year, 2020, then first-term president Donald Trump said he was considering banning the app because it was becoming so popular, with young people in particular, and because it was owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance it represented a potential national security threat. So the idea was that because Chinese companies are forced, by their very nature, to do what the Chinese government tells them—that’s just how things work over there—and to do so on the down-low if that’s what the governments demands, and to lie about having to do what the government tells them to do, if the government tells them to thus lie, it doesn’t matter that ByteDance’s leadership swore up and down to the world that the company will never use its popularity, and the data it soaks up from all its users as a result of that popularity, to help the Chinese government, the Chinese military, or Chinese intelligence services. It of course will have to do that, and if it doesn’t, its leaders could be black-bagged and disappeared in the night—because again, that’s just how things work over there. So the Trump administration decided to make TikTok a sort of bogeyman, representing Chinese companies in general, and to some degree the presence of China in the US and throughout the Western world, and said, nope, we’re not gonna let this thing continue to operate over here. It’s worth remembering, too, that by 2021 the world was enmeshed in the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in China, and which Trump and his administration were ardently attempting to tie to the Chinese government—calling Covid the Chinese Flu, and even worse things, as part of that effort. So this move against TikTok and its parent company, while based on genuine concerns about the ownership of the company and how and where the data being collected by said company is handled, it should also be seen as a political maneuver, allowing Trump, during the 2020 election run-up, to look like he was taking a big stand against a big foreign threat, China. What I’d like to talk about today is a deal that was proposed way back then by the Trump administration, as a potential way out for TikTok and ByteDance, allowing it to continue operating in the US despite threats to shut it down, now that said deal, or a version of it, seems to have finally come to fruition—and what we know about the shape of the resulting new, US-based version of TikTok. — On January 18, 2025, TikTok stopped worked in the US. It voluntarily suspended all services in the country in the lead-up to the implementation of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which was passed by the US congress and signed into law by then-president Joe Biden in April of 2024. This law gave social networking services controlled by ‘foreign adversaries’ 270 days, with the possibility of a 90-day extension, to divest themselves so that they’re no longer considered foreign adversary-owned. This law was almost exclusively aimed at TikTok, and the idea was that TikTok, in the US, would no longer be able to legally function following that deadline if it was still owned by China, which for the purposes of this law has been labeled a foreign adversary. ByteDance could keep TikTok in the US going if it sold a majority, controlling stake of its US-based assets to non-adversary owners, but otherwise it would have to shut down. Interestingly, though Trump was the original source of concerns about TikTok and its Chinese ownership during his first administration, when he stepped back into office in January 2025, he signed a new executive order that delayed the enforcement of this Biden-signed law, and then delayed it still-further, three more times after that, saying that he wanted to give American investors the time to negotiate controlling interest of US TikTok, rather than banning it. Those efforts eventually bore fruit in the shape of a new controlling entity called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, which is made up of a bunch of non-Chinese investment entities, including US software behemoth Oracle, an Emirati investment firm called MGX, a US investment firm called Silver Lake, and a personal investment company owned by Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Technologies. There are other, smaller investors also involved, but the red thread that runs through almost all of them is that they’re big Trump supporters and funders, funneling a lot of money into Trump’s campaigns, and his family businesses. So six years after the initial legal salvo was fired at TikTok in the US, the local assets are now controlled by non-Chinese investors, though the original Chinese owner, ByteDance, still owns just under 20%, compared to about 15% apiece for Oracle, MGX, and Silver Lake. The new company’s board is majority-run by those investors, too, which means it’s majority-run by ardent Trump supporters. We don’t yet know what effect this will have on content within the app, but under full Chinese ownership, topics related to democracy, Tianamen Square, and the LGBTQ community, among others, were significantly downgraded in the algorithm, ensuring they were seldom shown to anyone, which in turn disincentivized content that those owners didn’t like while incentivizing content that was pro-China, and pro-Chinese government priorities. It’s considered to be likely, by analysts who watch these sorts of maneuverings, that the same will be true of this new entity, but for and against subject matter that the Trump administration is for and against. Which raises the possibility that the new US TikTok, while superficially the same as the previous US TikTok, will slowly go the way X, formerly Twitter, has gone under Elon Musk, which was dramatically pushed in a new direction under its own owner, focusing on his political and ideological priorities and punishing users who spoke against those priorities. TikTok could become more or less an extension of the Trump-verse, in other words, and could thus become something more akin to Trump’s own network, Truth Social, or other right-leaning and far-right social networks, like conservative YouTube-clone, Rumble, rather than something less ideological, or maybe I should say less overtly politically ideological, like Meta’s Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. Users have already noticed some changes to US TikTok after the change in ownership, though, including what sorts of data are collected. TikTok’s new privacy policy, which all users have to agree to before using the app, now that the platform has changed hands, says that TikTok will be using precise location tracking, keeping tabs on exactly where users are located via their device’s GPS. That’s compared to the app’s previous approximate location-tracking effort, which used SIM card and IP address data to understand general proximity—it still uses that data, too, but now, rather than knowing what neighborhood you’re probably in, it may also know what room in your house you’re scrolling from. The new US TikTok also tracks users’ interactions with AI tools, including their prompts, outputs, and metadata attached to said interactions, which includes details about where users are when they’re using such tools, and what time they used them. They also collect gobs of marketing data from outside sources, and based on the users’ activity within the app. So things you buy, websites and other apps you visit and use, and conversations you have will all be sucked up and agglomerated into a profile that’s then used to show you targeted advertising. This isn’t unique to US TikTok, but the company does seem to intend to make use of more such data, and to combine it with that other stuff it’s now collecting, to increase the price it can charge for ads, because they’ll be a lot more specifically targeted than before. Some users are beginning to comb through the new user agreement with a fine-toothed comb, noticing, in addition to those aforementioned major changes, that the company also reserves the right to collect information about your physical and mental health, to use identifying information in the videos and images you might share, and information gleaned from people and their identifying characteristics in images and videos, and to collect biometric data, which usually means eyes and faces and walking gate and things like that, to differentiate and track people across such content. They can keep tabs on your sex life, sexual orientation and gender, your drug usage, your ethnic and racial origins, your citizenship and immigration status, your financial situation and information—all sorts of stuff is collected, and they say in the privacy policy and user agreement that they intend to do gather and store and cross-reference this kind of information whenever possible. Again, much of this isn’t novel, as social platforms are gobbling up all sorts of stuff about their users all the time, mostly to refine their ad placements because that allows them to charge advertisers more for better-targeted placements, over time. That said, because of the nature of the group that now owns US TikTok and which is making executive decisions about it, including, potentially, how this data is shared, including with the US government and its many agencies, there’s a chance we might see an exodus of sorts from the still younger-than-average user base of this network, because there is a nonzero chance it could become a tool in the Trump administration’s utility belt for tracking down people they don’t like and spreading messages that are favorable to them and their ideological aims; so basically what was happening under the previous ownership, but for the current US administration’s priorities, rather than those of the Chinese government. Show Notes https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-surpasses-google-popular-website-year-new-data-suggests-rcna9648 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/technology/tiktok-deal-oracle-bytedance-china-us.html https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-new-privacy-policy/ https://archive.is/20260123005655/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-23/tiktok-seals-deal-to-create-us-venture-with-oracle-silver-lake https://www.axios.com/2026/01/23/tiktok-deal-trump-app-ban https://www.theverge.com/tech/866868/tiktok-usds-new-owners-algorithm-explained https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/22/5-things-to-know-about-the-tiktok-deal-00743316 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/business/media/tiktok-us-terms-conditions.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93TikTok_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_ban_TikTok_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Foreign_Adversary_Controlled_Applications_Act This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about war, inflation, and currency devaluation. We also discuss tyrants, police violence, and social media threats. Recommended Book: Post-Growth Living by Kate Soper Transcript Back in mid-June of 2025, a shooting war erupted between Iran and Israel, with Israeli military forces launching attacks against multiple Iranian military sites, alongside sites associated with its nuclear program and against individual Iranian military leaders. Iran responded to these strikes, which left a lot of infrastructural damage and several military leaders assassinated, with large waves of missiles and drones against both Israeli and allied military targets, and soon after, later the same month, both sides agreed on a ceasefire and that was that. Following that blip of a war, though, Iran’s economy suffered greatly. It already wasn’t doing well, in part due to the crippling sanctions enforced by the US government for years, but also because of persistent mismanagement by Iran’s ruling regime, and the resultant deterioration of local infrastructure, both physical and bureaucratic. Millions of people fled Iranian urban centers during the war with Israel, and while most of them returned when the ceasefire was brokered, the pace of life and other fundaments of these cities never got back up to where they were, before, as there have been fairly consistent blackouts that have kept people from being able to function as normal, and these outages have also kept businesses from getting back on their feet. That, in turn, has resulted in closures and firings and an overall reduction in economic activity. The general hamhandedness of the government has amplified these issues, and the countless other issues of trying to exist within a country that is being so persistently targeted—both in the sense of those crushing sanctions from the US, but also in the sense of being periodically struck by Israel—has dramatically increased uncertainty throughout Iran these past several years. Even before that brief war, Iran was already on the backfoot, having suffered the loss of their local proxies, including the Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip—all of which have been either severely weakened by Israel in recent years, or functionally wiped out—and that in turn has more directly exposed them to meddling and attacks from their key opposition, which includes the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. That new vulnerability has put the Iranian government on high-alert, and the compounding effects of all that infrastructural damage, mismanagement, and the need to reallocate more resources to defense has left the country suffering very high levels of inflation, a severely devalued currency, regular blackouts, mass unemployment, a water shortage, and long-time repression from a government that is in many ways more paranoid and flailing than in any time in recent memory. What I’d like to talk about today is a recent wave of protests across Iran and why the US government is apparently considering taking action to support protestors against the Iranian government. — Iran has long suffered all sorts of issues, including regular efforts by ethnic secessionists to pull it apart into pieces they periodically occupy and want to govern, themselves, and concerns from citizens that the government spends a whole lot of their time and the nation’s resources enriching themselves, oppressing the citizenry, funding what seems to be a pointless nuclear program, and prioritizing their offensive efforts against Israel and their other regional enemies, often by arming and funding those aforementioned, now somewhat defunct proxy militias and militaries. On top of all that, as of October 2025, inflation in Iran had surged to 48.6% and the Iranian currency, the rial, dropped in value to 1.45 million per dollar. The government tried to artificially boost the value of the rial to 1.38 million per dollar in early January of 2026, but it dropped further, to 1.5 million per dollar a few days later, hitting a record low. This combined with that wild inflation rate, made the basic fundamentals of life, food, electricity, and so on, unaffordable, even for those who still had jobs, which was an ever-shrinking portion of the population. For context, the drop of the rial to a value of 1.38 million per dollar, the boosted value, represented a loss of about 40% of the rial’s value since June of 2025, just before that war with Israel, which is a staggering loss, as that means folk’s life savings lost that much in about half a year. When currency values and inflation hit that level of volatility, doing business becomes difficult. It often makes more sense to close up shop than to try to keep the doors open, because you don’t know if the price you charge for your product or service will make you a profit or not: there’s a chance you’ll sell things at a loss, because the value of the money you receive and the cost of goods you require, both to survive and to keep your business functioning, will change before the day ends, or before the sale can be completed. Iran’s economic crisis has further exploded in the past few weeks, then, because all those issues have compounded and spiraled to the point that simply selling things and buying things have become too risky for many people and entities, and that means folks are having even more trouble getting food and keeping the lights on than before; which becomes a real survival issue, on top of the regular crackdowns and abuses by the government that they’ve suffered in various ways for decades. In 2022, those abuses and limits on personal rights led to large protests that were catalyzed by the death of a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini, who was in police custody for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. Those 2022 protests were historically large—the biggest in the country, by some estimates at least, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. On December 28 2025, a group of shopkeepers in Iran’s capital city, Tehran, went on strike, closing their shops in protest against what’s been happening with Iran’s economy; again, it’s basically impossible to safely do business in a country with that much inflation and currency devaluation happening. Other shopkeepers followed suit, and large protests formed around these closed shops. Those protests flooded social media platforms in short order, protestors shouting slogans that indicated they were pissed off about all the economic mismanagement in the country, and then eventually that led to anti-government slogans being shouted, as well. Things remained peaceful at these protests, at first, and they expanded across the country within the next few days, shops closing and people filling the streets. By the fourth day, police had started to use live ammunition and tear gas against protestors, some of the protestors were killed, and things spiraled from there. By December 31, the government ordered a total, nationwide business shutdown, to try to get ahead of these protests, which again tended to revolve around the shutdown of businesses in protest—the government said they were making this call because of cold weather, but the writing was kind of on the wall at this point that they were scrambling to make it look like businesses were shutting down because they said so, not in protest of the government. The government also announced that they would start cracking down on protestors, hard, and on the first day of 2026, things escalated further, police using even more force against those who gathered, which of course led to more protests in more places, more angry slogans being shouted, and more protestor deaths at the hands of government forces. Protests had spread to all 31 Iranian provinces by early January of 2026, and at this point there were only 17 confirmed deaths. US President Donald Trump got involved around this time, maybe feeling confident following the successful nighttime grab of Venezuelan President Maduro; whatever the case, he warned the Iranian government not to shoot protestors, or the US government might have to get involved, coming to the protestors’ rescue. Iran’s government responded by saying the rioters must be put in their place, suppressing the funerals of protestors, and muffling local internet service, slowing down access speeds and increasing the number of outages by about a third. They threatened to execute hundreds of protestors by hanging, then said they wouldn’t. Trump declared this to be a personal victory, though the Iranian government has used his insinuation of himself into the matter to position the fight as Iran against the US, the protestors backed by their great enemy, which has shown itself to be responsible for these protests. The government then started forcing captured protestors to make confessions on video, which only seemed to further anger the non-arrested protestors, and some protestors began to fight back, in one case setting a police officer on fire, and in other cases local militia groups defended protestors against police, leading to several deaths. Iran’s government shut down more communication services in an attempt to regain control, in some cities taking down the internet completely, though some information, photos and videos of police abuses of protestors still made it out into the wider world using satellite services like Starlink, and by the 9th of January, protests reached a scale that rivaled and maybe surpassed those seen during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and protestors began to set fire to buildings associated with the Islamic Republic, the government, and directly clashing with security forces in some cases. Hundreds of people were reportedly killed per day from that point forward, and thousands were rushed to hospitals, overwhelming local doctors. Thousands of people were also violently killed by police, under cover of the now complete internet blackout, and on January 10th, it was estimated that around 2,000 protestors had been killed in the past two days, alone, while other estimates from inside and outside Iran range from 12,000 to 20,000 protestors killed by the government. The most reliable source I could find, as of last weekend, indicated that the true number of dead is something like 3,300 people, at minimum. In the past week or so, the Iranian government has apparently figured out how to jam Starlink internet signals, making it even more difficult for protestors to share what’s happening in the country, and President Trump posted on his social network, Truth Social, telling Iranian citizens that they should overthrow the government and that help is on the way. The Iranian government has arrested tens of thousands of people, has tanks patrolling their towns and cities, and seems to have successfully quashed protests for the time being; no protests at all were reported across the country as of mid-January, and so many people were killed and injured that hospitals and other institutions are still overwhelmed, trying to work through their backlog; much of the country is in mourning. Government forces are reportedly going door to door to arrest people who were spotted in CCTV and social media footage participating in protests, and they’ve set up checkpoints to stop people, look through their phones, and arrest them if any photos or videos are found that indicate they were at protests, deleting that digital evidence in the process. This remains a fast-moving story and there’s a chance something significant, like the US striking Iranian government targets, or renewed, more focused protests will arise in the coming days and weeks. Some analysts have argued that it’s kind of a no-brainer for the Trump administration to hit the Iranian government while it’s strained in this way, because it’s a long-time enemy of the US and its allies that’s currently weak, and doing so would reinforce the narrative, sparked with the capture of Maduro, that Trump’s administration is anti-tyrant; which is questionable by most measures, but again, this is a narrative, not necessarily reality. And narratives are powerful, especially going into an election year. It’s also possible that, because economic conditions in Iran haven’t changed, that this is just the beginning of something bigger; protestors and militias taking a moment to regain their footing and consider what they might do to have more of an impact when they start back up again. Show Notes https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601130145 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/31/we-want-the-mullahs-gone-economic-crisis-sparks-biggest-protests-in-iran-since-2022 https://www.nytimes.com/article/iran-protests-inflation-currency.html https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/06/25/mapping-the-protests-in-iran-2/ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/us/politics/trump-iran-strikes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/world/middleeast/iran-protests-death-toll.html https://www.reuters.com/world/china/iranian-mp-warns-greater-unrest-urging-government-address-grievances-2026-01-13/ https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-is-hunting-down-starlink-users-to-stop-protest-videos-from-going-global-d8b49602 https://archive.is/20260114175227/https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/bank-collapse-iran-protests-83f6b681 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-protest-death-toll-over-12000-feared-higher-video-bodies-at-morgue/ https://sundayguardianlive.com/world/did-irans-currency-collapse-rial-plummets-to-000-against-euro-while-inflation-protests-escalate-across-the-country-164403/ https://archive.is/20260116034429/https://www.ft.com/content/5d848323-84a9-4512-abd2-dd09e0a786a3 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2jek15m8no https://theconversation.com/the-use-of-military-force-in-iran-could-backfire-for-washington-273264 https://archive.is/20260114182636/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/01/14/iran-regime-protest-trump-strike/ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/world/middleeast/iran-protests-deadly-crackdown.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/17/world/middleeast/iran-ayatollah-khamenei.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_Iranian_protests https://www.en-hrana.org/day-thirteen-of-the-protests-nighttime-demonstrations-continue-amid-internet-shutdown/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iran_internal_crisis https://apnews.com/article/iran-protests-trump-khamenei-fc11b1082fb75fca02205f668c822751 This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about Venezuela, Maduro, and international law. We also discuss sour crude, extrajudicial killings, and Greenland. Recommended Book: The Keep by F. Paul Wilson Transcript Back in mid-November of 2025, I did an episode on extrajudicial killings, focusing on the targeting of speedboats, mostly from Venezuela headed toward the United States, by the US military. These boats were allegedly carrying drugs meant for the US market, and the US government justified these strikes by saying, basically, we have a right to protect ourselves, protect our citizens from the harm caused by these illegal substances, and if we have to keep taking out these boats and killing these people to do that, we will. There’s been a lot of back-and-forthing about the legitimacy of this approach, both in the sense that not all of these boats have been shown to be carrying drugs, some just seemed to be fishing boats in the wrong place at the wrong time, and in the sense that launching strikes without the go-ahead of Congress in the US is a legally dubious business. There was also the matter of some alleged follow-up strikes, which seemed to be intended to kill people who survived the initial taking-out of the boats, which is a big international human rights no no, to the point of potentially being a war crime. All of this happened within the context of a war of words between US President Trump’s second administration and the increasingly authoritarian regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who followed the previous president Hugo Chávez as his hand-picked successor, and has more or less completed the authoritarian process of dissolving, coopting, or diminishing all aspects of the Venezuelan government that might ever check his power, which allowed him, in 2024, to bar the very popular, now Nobel Peace Prize winning candidate María Corina Machado from running, and her sub-in candidate, like previous Maduro opponent Juan Guaido, seems to have won the election by a fair bit, and in an internationally provable way, but Maduro’s government faked results that made it look like he won, and his single-party rule has since continued unabated. Or rather, it continued unabated until the early morning of January 3, 2026, around 2am, when US Operation Absolute Resolve kicked into action, leading to the—depending on who you ask—justified captured or illegal kidnapping—of Maduro and his wife from a stronghold in his country. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today: the operation itself, but also the consequences and potential meaning of it within the context of other important things happening in the world right now. — Maduro is immensely popular with about a fifth of the Venezuelan population, but essentially everyone else is strongly opposes him and his iron-fisted rule. It’s estimated that between 2017 and 2025, just shy of 8 million people, which is more than 20% of Venezuela’s 2017 population, has fled the country in order to escape a tyrannical government and its failed policies, which have collapsed the economy, made getting working and feeding oneself and one’s family difficult, and made crime, conflict, and the state-sanctioned oppression of anyone who doesn’t kowtow to the ruling party a commonplace thing. Trump speculated about the possibility of invading Venezuela even in his first administration, and part of the overt rationale was that it’s run by a failed government that most of the locals hate, so it would be an easy win. That justification shifted to orient around immigration and drugs by his second administration, and then more recently, Trump has said publicly that the real issue here is that Venezuela stole a bunch of US company-owned oil assets when it nationalized the industry back in the day, and those assets should be recaptured, given back to the US. Operation Absolute Resolve took months to plan and only about two and a half hours to complete. By most objective measures it was a spectacular military and intelligence success, especially considering all the moving parts and thus, all the things that could have gone wrong. The operation apparently involved at least 150 aircraft of various sorts, a spy within Maduro’s government, and months of surveillance, which helped them establish Maduro’s habits and routines, and that allowed them to map out where he would be, when, and what to expect going in to get him. All of these patterns changed in September of 2025 when US warships started massing in Caribbean, as Maduro started to get a little paranoid—justifiably, as it turns out—and he started moving between eight different locations, seldom sleeping in the same place more than one night in a row. He was eventually grabbed from a military base in Caracas, Venezuela’s capitol, and to make that happen the US military assets in the area had to take out local aviation and air defenses so that US Delta Force troops could be carried in by helicopter. Several air bases and communications centers were taken out by missiles, and fighter jets were bombed on air base tarmacs. Trump alluded that a cyberattack of some kind might have also been used to take out power in the area, though satellite imagery suggests bombs might have been used against a power station to make that happen. The operation apparently went almost exactly as planned, though a helicopter was damaged and the Delta Force team killed a large part of Maduro’s security team when he refused to surrender. A few US soldiers were wounded, but none were killed, and Venezuelan officials said, in the aftermath, that lat least 40 Venezuelans were killed throughout the country during the operation. Maduro and his wife were swept from the base before they could lock themselves in their safe room, and they were tucked into the helicopters which headed out to sea, landing them on the USS Iwo Jima, which is an assault ship. All of this took a matter of hours and, again, is generally considered to be an objective success, in terms of precision, outcome, and other such metrics. Morally, legally, and politically, however, the operation is receiving a far more mixed response, and that response is continuing to play out as Maduro works his way through a bizarre version of the US justice system where he’s being sent to court for drug dealing. In the US, Trump supporters have generally said all of this was a good, smart move, though some maintain that US involvement in any kind of international conflict is a waste of time, effort, and resources, and they worry about getting bogged down in another Iraq or Afghanistan-style conflict. Everyone else is generally against the effort, even those who admit that Maduro was a tyrant who needed to go—it’s good that he’s gone, but the way in which it was done is not just questionable, but worrying because of what it says about Trump’s capacity to unilaterally launch kidnapping missions against the leaders of other countries. Not a good look, but also kind of scary. Internationally the response is generally aligned with the latter opinion, especially in other countries that Trump has at some point threatened, which is most of them. Governments in South and Central America have been especially concerned, however, because one of Trump’s newer messaging efforts has revolved around the concept of a Western Hemisphere basically owned and protected by the US. Do whatever you want in the rest of the world, basically, but everything over here is ours. This has raised the possibility that an emboldened Trump might attempt similar maneuvers soon, including possibly claiming the Panama Canal for the US again, or grabbing the leaders of other Latin American countries he doesn’t think are kowtowing enthusiastically enough; toeing the new international line that he’s drawing, basically. He’s also renewed messaging around the possible purchase or capture of Greenland, which has been raising alarm bells across Europe in particular. Greenland is considered to be a vital strategic base for US security, and it would grant potential access to an abundance of also strategically and economically important minerals, both on land and underwater, but Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark, and most European leaders have said something along the lines of “if the US takes action to militarily claim Greenland, that’ll be the end of NATO,” an organization that was originally founded to help protect the world, and Europe especially, from military conquest from the Soviet Union, but which, at that point, might be recalibrated to protect against incursions from the US, as well. NATO has been mostly funded and perpetuated by the US until recently, however, so there’s a chance that something else would need to replace it, if the US is no longer providing nuclear deterrence as the ultimate whammy against a potential Russian invasion of its European neighbors. The UN has also indicated that they consider this operation to be a violation of international law, and have called it a dangerous precedent—because one nation capturing the leader of another nation, unilaterally, kind of negates the purpose of negotiations and the whole concept of international law. That kind of use of force is meant to be granted by the UN, not attempted secretively and outside the bounds of international processes for such things. All that said, the Trump administration seems to be leaning into the victory, gleefully talking about next-step potential targets, the most likely of which seem to be in Iran, a long-time US opponent, and a target of this administration last year, when the US attacked Iranian nuclear facilities alongside Israel. There are ongoing, very large and seemingly significant protests happening across Iran right now, so the US could see this as another opportunity to topple another unpopular authoritarian regime while also getting the chance to flex its military and intelligence capabilities at a moment in which another big-name player in that space, Russia, is generally flailing; it’s failed to protect several of its allies, including Venezuela, over the past few years, and its intended few-day invasion of Ukraine has now stretched into years. That contrast is considered to be meaningful by most analysts, and though a lot of the PR about the capture of Maduro has focused on the oil, most US-based oil executives have said it’s a red herring—the hundreds of billions of dollars required to get more of Venezuela’s thick, dirty, expensive to process oil pumping and back on the market wouldn’t be worth it—and it’s more likely that this is partly a means of keeping the press and US public focused on something other than the Epstein files, which is a major scandal for Trump and his administration, while also allowing Trump to test the boundaries of his power; what the public and government will let him get away with currently, and what he can do to expand the range of what he can do without any outside buy-in or significant personal consequences, in the future. Show Notes https://theconversation.com/how-maduros-capture-went-down-a-military-strategist-explains-what-goes-into-a-successful-special-op-272671 https://archive.is/20260105035543/https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/01/trump-nicolas-maduro-venezuela/685493/ https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/chevron-charts-a-new-path-in-venezuela-to-unlock-vast-oil-reserves-0369ce1b https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/04/tactical-surprise-and-air-dominance-how-the-us-snatched-maduro-in-two-and-a-half-hours https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/us/politics/trump-iran-strikes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/nyregion/nicolas-maduro-lawyers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/business/dealbook/oil-executives-trump-venezuela.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/world/americas/venezuela-oil-tanker-us.html https://www.axios.com/2026/01/11/trump-iran-protest-options-death-toll https://www.axios.com/2026/01/03/maduro-capture-trump-venezuela-operation https://www.axios.com/2025/05/11/trump-maga-western-civilization https://www.axios.com/2026/01/08/venezuela-war-powers-senate-aumf-time-kaine https://www.axios.com/2026/01/07/trump-russia-oil-tanker-seize-bella-venzuela https://www.axios.com/2026/01/08/trumps-donroe-doctrine-sets-us-on-great-power-collision-course https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/05/un-security-council-trump-attack-venezuela https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/us/politics/trump-interview-power-morality.html This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about prediction markets, incentives, and gambling addiction. We also discuss insider trading, spot-fixing, and Gatorade. Recommended Book: The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory by Tim Alberta Transcript Prediction markets are hundreds of years old, and have historically been used to determine the likelihood of something happening. In 1503, for instance, there was a market to determine who would become the next pope, and from the earliest days of commercial markets, there were associated prediction markets that were used to gauge how folks thought a given business would do during an upcoming economic quarter. The theory here is that while you can just ask people how well they think a political candidate will fare in an election or who they think will become the next pope, often their guesses, their assumptions, or their analysis will be swayed by things like political affiliation or maybe even what they think they’re meant to say—the popular papal candidate, for instance, or the non-obvious, asymmetric position on a big commercial enterprise that might help an analyst reinforce their brand as a contrarian. If you introduce money into the equation, though, forcing people to put down real currency on their suspicions and predictions, and give them the chance to earn money if they get things right, that will sometimes nudge these markets away from those other incentives, making the markets commercial enterprises of their own. It can shift the bias away from posturing and toward monetization, and that in turn, in theory at least, should make prediction markets more accurate because people will try to align themselves with the actual, real-deal outcome, rather than the popular—with their social tribe, at least—or compellingly unpopular view. This is the theory that underpins entities like Polymarket, Kalshi, Manifold Markets, and many other online prediction markets that have arisen over the past handful of years as regulations on these types of businesses have been eased, and as they’ve begun to establish themselves as credible players in the predicting-everything space. In politics in particular, these markets have semi-regularly shown themselves to be better gauges of who will actually win elections than conventional polls and surveys, and though their records are far from perfect and still heavily biased in some cases, such community-driven predictions from money-motivated markets are gaining credibility because of their capacity to incentivize people to put their money where their mouths are, and to try to profit from accurate preordination. The flip-side of these markets, and some might even say a built-in flaw with no obvious solution, is that they are rife with insider trading: people who are in the position to know things ahead of time making in some cases millions of dollars by placing big bets that, for them, aren’t bets at all, because they know what will or what is likely to happen. This seems to have occurred at least a few times with big political events in 2025, and it’s anticipated that it could become an even bigger issue in the future, especially for markets that use cryptocurrencies to manage payments, as those are even less likely than their fiat currency peers to keeps solid tabs on who’s actually behind these bets, and thus who might be trading on knowledge that they’re not supposed to be trading on. That said, it could be argued that such insider trading makes these markets even more accurate, eventually at least. And that points us toward another problem: the possibility that someone on the inside might look at a market and realize they can make a killing if they use their position, their power to sway these markets after placing a bet, giving them the ability to assure a payout by abusing their position—major events being influenced by the possibility of a community-funded payday for those in control. What I’d like to talk about today is the same general principle as it’s playing out in the sports world, and why the huge sums of money that are now sloshing around in the sports betting industry in the US are beginning to worry basically everyone, except the sports betting companies themselves. — In October of 2025, the head coach of the NBA basketball team, the Portland Trail Blazers, Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat player Terry Rozier, and former NBA player Damon Jones, and about 30 other people were arrested by the FBI due to their alleged illegal sports gambling activities. Rozier was already under investigation following unusual betting activity that was linked to his performance in a 2023 game—he was later cleared of wrongdoing, but the implication then and in this more recent instance is that he and those other folks who were rounded up by the FBI may have been involved in rigging things so they could get a big payoff on gambling markets. Similar things have been happening across the sports world, including a lifetime ban for Jontay Porter, a former Toronto Raptors player, who apparently gave confidential information to people who were placing bets on NBA games—he later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud as a result of that investigation—and in November of 2025 two Major League Baseball players, both of them pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, were charged by federal prosecutors for allegedly rigging pitches to benefit people betting on those pitches; they’ve been charged with wire fraud and money laundering, and each could face up to 65 years in prison. And those are just a few of the many instances of game-rigging that have been alleged in recent years, the specifics of which vary, but the outcome is always to give someone an advantage in these markets, which are only recently broadly legal across the United States, and which thus allow folks with the right connections or some money to invest ahead of time to, for instance, pay a pitcher to throw an inning, or pay a coach to tell them who will be benched and when, so that they can make a big wager with less of a risk, or in some cases, no risk at all. One of the big issues here is that rather than simply being a which-team-will-win sort of thing, many of these bets are highly specific and granular, including what are called proposition or prop bets that allow folks to gamble on the number of strikeouts a pitcher will tally in a given inning and other very specific things. If a pitcher were to then place a bet, perhaps through an intermediary, on their own prop bet-related performance, they would stand a decent chance of tallying the right number of strikes and balls. They could also sell that information to someone else, taking a guaranteed payout in exchange for the foreknowledge they grant that gambler, who could then do what they want with the information, and then if they do well with it, they could pay that pitcher to do the same again in the future. This type of bet is called spot-fixing, and it’s seen across prediction markets, not just sports markets. Pitchers can fix an inning of a game, but poker players can also go all-in or fold a given number of times in a tournament, and the folks in charge of dumping Gatorade over the winning coach following a Super Bowl event can leak that color, based on their foreknowledge of the setup, to gamblers—these markets are sprawling and varied, and anyone in any position of power who can make decisions about such things, or who’s involved enough to leak information can do so at a profit, either themselves putting down money on spot-fixed prop bets, or selling that information to those who will themselves place a bet. The issue sports organizations in the US are now running into is that while they aligned themselves with sports gambling entities like DraftKings and FanDuel after these platforms were legalized in more states following the striking-down of a federal ban on such things in 2018—as I record this, they’re currently legal in 31 states, alongside Washington DC and Puerto Rico—and they’ve profited a fair bit from that, allowing these businesses to become sponsors, to slap their logos on everything, and to generally become interwoven with the leagues themselves; despite all that, they’ve also created a sports culture in which betting is ultra-common, and that means fans are no longer just fans, they’re putting down money on various possible sports-related outcomes. That means folks who were maybe previously die-hard fans of their local team may no longer just be disappointed when their team loses, they’ll be financially impacted, perhaps even devastated. And many athletes who play on these teams, in these leagues, are now suffering all kinds of abuse and threats from people who decided to put a lot of money on their performance, but who failed to win a game, or maybe even throw the exact right number of strikes and balls in a given inning. This points at two big issues with sports betting in the US right now. First is that there’s a lot of money splashing around in this space. An estimated $160-170 billion was wagered by US citizens in 2025 alone, generating about $16.4 billion in revenue for sportsbooks—the entities that take these sorts of bets. That’s likely a significant undercount, too, as more generalist prediction markets are also getting involved in the sports betting game, blending this type of gambling with other sorts of prediction markets, like those related to politics and international happenings, like war. And second, a lot of people are gambling a lot of money on sports stuff right now, and that’s becoming an issue. In October of 2025, a Pew Research poll found that 43% of US adults think legalized sports betting is bad for society, up from 34% in 2022, and 40% says it’s bad for sports, up from 33%. A whopping 22% of US adults say they personally bet money on sports in the past year, up from 19% in 2022, and 10%, one in ten American adults, say they have placed a sports bet online in the past year, up from 6% in 2022. There has been a significant increase in calls to the National Problem Gambling Helpline in recent years—a 45% increase from 2017 in states where sports betting hasn’t been legalized, and a 148% increase, more than three times as much, in states where sports betting was legalized by August of 2025. Not for nothing, too, it’s estimated that professional athletes are about five-times more likely than the average person to become hooked on gambling, which would seem to amplify all these issues, in addition to the obvious problems this can create for people with often high-paying, but also often financially precarious, short-term careers. The implication, then, is that legal sports betting either sparks or reinforces gambling issues, creating more addictive behavior and triggering more financial issues. And bankruptcy numbers seem to back this up: in states where online gambling is allowed, bankruptcy rates increased by 28% and debt collections rose by 8% just two years after sports betting legalization. Data also shows that there’s a 20% increase in mass-market alcohol consumption in states with legalized sports betting, and that for every dollar spent on sports betting, 99 cents of investment money disappears from records, which means, basically, people are not using spare money they would spend on random stuff anyway when placing these bets, they’re spending money that would otherwise be put into savings, or which is already in their savings on this type of gambling—and much of that money then disappears into the pockets of these gambling platforms. This same general state of affairs has played out in other countries before the US, but things seem to be moving especially fast here in part because this isn’t gambling that’s limited to a physical location, it’s increasingly being conducted on smartphones and other always-on-us devices, and that means it’s easier to get hooked, but also that it’s more accessible to more people more of the time, and the ever-present deluge of information about these topics, and about these platforms that allow us to casually place bets on said topics, make getting sucked in and sold on the idea of easy money, simpler and more likely than ever before. Show Notes https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2025/10/23/nba-chauncey-billups-terry-rozier-arrested-betting-probe/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2025/11/09/emmanuel-clase-luis-ortiz-indicted-bribes/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2025/12/29/sports-betting-integrity-fans/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2025/10/29/player-prop-bets-nba-arrests/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2025/06/14/sports-betting-athlete-abuse-online/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bookmakers https://www.actionnetwork.com/online-sports-betting https://nypost.com/betting/best-sports-betting-apps-usa/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_betting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportsbook https://www.delasport.com/history-of-sports-betting/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7780080/ https://www.espn.com/sports-betting/story/_/id/23561576/chalk-line-how-got-legalized-sports-betting https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/03/sport/sports-betting-usa-impact-on-lives-spt-intl https://naadgs.org/history-of-sports-betting-the-transition-from-illegal-to-mainstream/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_match-fixing_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gambling_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_and_Amateur_Sports_Protection_Act_of_1992 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market https://users.wfu.edu/strumpks/papers/Int_Election_Betting_Formatted_FINAL_NoComments.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposition_bet https://www.axios.com/2025/12/14/sports-betting-gambling-young-men-crisis https://www.espn.com/espn/betting/story/_/id/47337056/scandals-prediction-markets-2025-turning-point-sports-betting https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/02/americans-increasingly-see-legal-sports-betting-as-a-bad-thing-for-society-and-sports/ This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about energy consumption, pollution, and bipartisan issues. We also discuss local politics, data center costs, and the Magnificent 7 tech companies. Recommended Book: Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth Transcript In 2024, the International Energy Agency estimated that data centers consumed about 1.5% of all electricity generated, globally, that year. It went on to project that energy consumption by data centers could double by 2030, though other estimates are higher, due to the ballooning of investment in AI-focused data centers by some of the world’s largest tech companies. There are all sorts of data centers that serve all kinds of purposes, and they’ve been around since the mid-20th century, since the development of general purposes digital computers, like the 1945 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, which was programmable and reprogrammable, and used to study, among other things, the feasibility of thermonuclear weapons. ENIAC was built on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania and cost just shy of $500,000, which in today’s money would be around $7 million. It was able to do calculators about a thousand times faster than other, electro-mechanical calculators that were available at the time, and was thus considered to be a pretty big deal, making some types of calculation that were previously not feasible, not only feasible, but casually accomplishable. This general model of building big-old computers at a center location was the way of things, on a practical level, until the dawn of personal computers in the 1980s. The mainframe-terminal setup that dominated until then necessitated that the huge, cumbersome computing hardware was all located in a big room somewhere, and then the terminal devices were points of access that allowed people to tap into those centralized resources. Microcomputers of the sort of a person might have in their home changed that dynamic, but the dawn of the internet reintroduced something similar, allowing folks to have a computer at home or at their desk, which has its own resources, but to then tap into other microcomputers, and to still other larger, more powerful computers across internet connections. Going on the web and visiting a website is basically just that: connecting to another computer somewhere, that distant device storing the website data on its hard drive and sending the results to your probably less-powerful device, at home or work. In the late-90s and early 2000s, this dynamic evolved still further, those far-off machines doing more and more heavy-lifting to create more and more sophisticated online experiences. This manifested as websites that were malleable and editable by the end-user—part of the so-called Web 2.0 experience, which allowed for comments and chat rooms and the uploading of images to those sites, based at those far off machines—and then as streaming video and music, and proto-versions of social networks became a thing, these channels connecting personal devices to more powerful, far-off devices needed more bandwidth, because more and more work was being done by those powerful, centrally located computers, so that the results could be distributed via the internet to all those personal computers and, increasingly, other devices like phones and tablets. Modern data centers do a lot of the same work as those earlier iterations, though increasingly they do a whole lot more heavy-lifting labor, as well. They’ve got hardware capable of, for instance, playing the most high-end video games at the highest settings, and then sending, frame by frame, the output of said video games to a weaker device, someone’s phone or comparably low-end computer, at home, allowing the user of those weaker devices to play those games, their keyboard or controller inputs sent to the data center fast enough that they can control what’s happening and see the result on their own screen in less than the blink of an eye. This is also what allows folks to store backups on cloud servers, big hard drives located in such facilities, and it’s what allows the current AI boom to function—all the expensive computers and their high-end chips located at enormous data centers with sophisticated cooling systems and high-throughput cables that allow folks around the world to tap into their AI models, interact with them, have them do heavy-lifting for them, and then those computers at these data centers send all that information back out into the world, to their devices, even if those devices are underpowered and could never do that same kind of work on their own. What I’d like to talk about today are data centers, the enormous boom in their construction, and how these things are becoming a surprise hot button political issue pretty much everywhere. — As of early 2024, the US was host to nearly 5,400 data centers sprawled across the country. That’s more than any other nation, and that number is growing quickly as those aforementioned enormous tech companies, including the Magnificent 7 tech companies, Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla, which have a combined market cap of about $21.7 trillion as of mid-December 2025, which is about two-thirds of the US’s total GDP for the year, and which is more than the European Union’s total GDP, which weighs in at around $19.4 trillion, as of October 2025—as they splurge on more and more of them. These aren’t the only companies building data centers at breakneck speed—there are quite a few competitors in China doing the same, for instance—but they’re putting up the lion’s share of resources for this sort of infrastructure right now, in part because they anticipate a whole lot of near-future demand for AI services, and those services require just a silly amount of processing power, which itself requires a silly amount of monetary investment and electricity, but also because, first, there aren’t a lot of moats, meaning protective, defensive assets in this industry, as is evidenced by their continual leapfrogging of each other, and the notion that a lot of what they’re doing, today, will probably become commodity services in not too long, rather than high-end services people and businesses will be inclined to pay big money for, and second, because there’s a suspicion, held by many in this industry, that there’s an AI shake-out coming, a bubble pop or bare-minimum a release of air from that bubble, which will probably kill off a huge chunk of the industry, leaving just the largest, too-big-to-fail players still intact, who can then gobble up the rest of the dying industry at a discount. Those who have the infrastructure, who have invested the huge sums of money to build these data centers, basically, will be in a prime position to survive that extinction-level event, in other words. So they’re all scrambling to erect these things as quickly as possible, lest they be left behind. That construction, though, is easier said than done. The highest-end chips account for around 70-80% of a modern data center’s cost, as these GPUs, graphical processing units that are optimized for AI purposes, like Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, can cost tens of thousands of dollars apiece, and millions of dollars per rack. There are a lot of racks of such chips in these data centers, and the total cost of a large-scale AI-optimized data center is often somewhere between $35 and $60 billion. A recent estimate by McKinsey suggests that by 2030, data center investment will need to be around $6.7 trillion a year just to keep up the pace and meet demand for compute power. That’s demand from these tech companies, I should say—there’s a big debate about where there’s sufficient demand from consumers of AI products, and whether these tech companies are trying to create such demand from whole cloth, to justify heightened valuations, and thus to continue goosing their market caps, which in turn enriches those at the top of these companies. That said, it’s a fair bet that for at least a few more years this influx in investment will continue, and that means pumping out more of these data centers. But building these sorts of facilities isn’t just expensive, it’s also regulatorily complex. There are smaller facilities, akin to ENIAC’s campus location, back in the day, but a lot of them—because of the economies of scale inherent in building a lot of this stuff all at once, all in the same place—are enormous, a single data center facility covering thousands of acres and consuming a whole lot of power to keep all of those computers with their high-end chips running 24/7. Previous data centers from the pre-AI era tended to consume in the neighborhood of 30MW of energy, but the baseline now is closer to 200MW. The largest contemporary data centers consume 1GW of electricity, which is about the size of a small city’s power grid—that’s a city of maybe 500,000-750,000 people, though of course climate, industry, and other variables determine the exact energy requirements of a city—and they’re expected to just get larger and more resource-intensive from here. This has resulted in panic and pullbacks in some areas. In Dublin, for instance, the government has stopped issuing new grid connections for data centers until 2028, as it’s estimated that data centers will account for 28% of Ireland’s power use by 2031, already. Some of these big tech companies have read the writing on the wall, and are either making deals to reactivate aging power plants—nuclear, gas, coal, whatever they can get—or are saying they’ll build new ones to offset the impact on the local power grid. And that impact can be significant. In addition to the health and pollution issues caused by some of the sites—in Memphis, for instance, where Elon Musk’s company, xAI, built a huge data center to help power his AI chatbot, Grok, the company is operating 35 unpermitted gas turbines, which it says are temporary, but which have been exacerbating locals’ health issues and particulate numbers—in addition to those issues, energy prices across the US are up 6.9% year over year as of December 2025, which is much higher than overall inflation. Those costs are expected to increase still further as data centers claim more of the finite energy available on these grids, which in turn means less available for everyone else, and that scarcity, because of supply and demand, increases the cost of that remaining energy. As a consequence of these issues, and what’s broadly being seen as casual overstepping of laws and regulations by these companies, which often funnel a lot of money to local politicians to help smooth the path for their construction ambitions, there are bipartisan efforts around the world to halt construction on these things, locals saying the claimed benefits, like jobs, don’t actually make sense—as construction jobs will be temporary, and the data centers themselves don’t require many human maintainers or operators, and because they consume all that energy, in some cases might consume a bunch of water—possibly not as much as other grand-scale developments, like golf courses, but still—and they tend to generate a bunch of low-level, at times harmful background noise, can create a bunch of local pollution, and in general take up a bunch of space without giving any real benefit to the locals. Interestingly, this is one of the few truly bipartisan issues that seems to be persisting in the United States, at a moment in which it’s often difficult to find things Republicans and Democrats can agree on, and that’s seemingly because it’s not just a ‘big companies led by untouchable rich people stomping around in often poorer communities and taking what they want’ sort of issue, it’s also an affordability issue, because the installation of these things seems to already be pushing prices higher—when the price of energy goes up, the price of just about everything goes up—and it seems likely to push prices even higher in the coming years. We’ll see to what degree this influences politics and platforms moving forward, but some local politicians in particular are already making hay by using antagonism toward the construction of new data centers a part of their policy and campaign promises, and considering the speed at which these things are being constructed, and the slow build of resistance toward them, it’s also an issue that could persist through the US congressional election in 2026, to the subsequent presidential election in 2028. Show Notes https://www.wired.com/story/opposed-to-data-centers-the-working-families-party-wants-you-to-run-for-office/ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/without-data-centers-gdp-growth-171546326.html https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/ https://wreg.com/news/new-details-on-152m-data-center-planned-in-memphis/ https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memphis-gas-turbines-air-pollution-permits-00317582 https://www.datacenterwatch.org/report https://www.govtech.com/products/kent-county-mich-cancels-data-center-meeting-due-to-crowd https://www.woodtv.com/news/kent-county/gaines-township-planning-commission-to-hold-hearing-on-data-center-rezoning/ https://www.theverge.com/science/841169/ai-data-center-opposition https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from-ai https://www.cbre.com/insights/reports/global-data-center-trends-2025 https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/chandler-city-council-unanimously-kills-sinema-backed-data-center-40628102/ https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2025/11/rural-michigan-fights-back-how-riled-up-residents-are-challenging-big-tech-data-centers.html?outputType=amp https://www.courthousenews.com/nonprofit-sues-to-block-165-billion-openai-data-center-in-rural-new-mexico/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-cancels-plans-for-data-center-caledonia-wisconsin/ https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/25/microsoft-ai-data-center-rejection-vs-support.html https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-caledonia-data-center-site-ozaukee-county https://thehill.com/opinion/robbys-radar/5655111-bernie-sanders-data-center-moratorium/ https://www.investopedia.com/magnificent-seven-stocks-8402262 https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-cost-of-compute-a-7-trillion-dollar-race-to-scale-data-centers https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/ai-power-expanding-data-center-capacity-to-meet-growing-demand https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/12/19/are-energyhungry-data-centers-causing-electric-bills-to-go-up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about NVIDIA, AI companies, and the US economy. We also discuss the US-China chip-gap, mixed-use technologies, and export bans. Recommended Book: Enshittification by Cory Doctorow Transcript I’ve spoken about this a few times in recent months, but it’s worth rehashing real quick because this collection of stories and entities are so central to what’s happening across a lot of the global economy, and is also fundamental, in a very load-bearing way, to the US economy right now. As of November of 2025, around the same time that Nvidia, the maker of the world’s best AI-optimized chips at the moment became the world’s first company to achieve a $5 trillion market cap, the top seven highest-valued tech companies, including Nvidia, accounted for about 32% of the total value of the US stock market. That’s an absolutely astonishing figure, as while Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Broadcom, and Meta all have a fairly diverse footprint even beyond their AI efforts, a lot of that value for all of them is predicated on expected future income; which is to say, their market caps, their value according to that measure, is determined not by their current assets and revenue, but by what investors think or hope they’ll pull in and be worth in the future. That’s important to note because historically the sorts of companies that have market caps that are many multiples of their current, more concrete values are startups; companies in their hatchling phase that have a good idea and some kind of big potential, a big moat around what they’re offering or a blue ocean sub-industry with little competition in which they can flourish, and investment is thus expected to help them grow fast. These top seven tech companies, in contrast, are all very mature, have been around for a while and have a lot of infrastructure, employees, expenses, and all the other things we typically associated with mature businesses, not flashy startups with their best days hopefully ahead of them. Some analysts have posited that part of why these companies are pushing the AI thing so hard, and in particular pushing the idea that they’re headed toward some kind of generally useful AI, or AGI, or superhuman AI that can do everyone’s jobs better and cheaper than humans can do them, is that in doing so, they’re imagining a world in which they, and they alone, because of the costs associated with building the data centers required to train and run the best-quality AI right now, are capable of producing basically an economy’s-worth of AI systems and bots and machines operated by those AI systems. In other words, they’re creating, from whole cloth, an imagined scenario in which they’re not just worthy of startup-like valuations, worthy of market caps that are tens or hundreds of times their actual concrete value, because of those possible futures they’re imagining in public, but they’re the only companies worthy of those valuation multiples; the only companies that matter anymore. It’s likely that even if this is the case, that the folks in charge of these companies, and the investors who have money in them who are likely to profit when the companies grow and grow, actually do believe what they’re telling everyone about the possibilities inherent in building these sorts of systems. But there also seems to be a purely economic motive for exaggerating a lot and clearing out as much of the competition as possible as they grow bigger and bigger. Because maybe they’ll actually make what they’re saying they can make as a result of all that investment, that exuberance, but maybe, failing that, they’ll just be the last companies standing after the bubble bursts and an economic wildfire clears out all the smaller companies that couldn’t get the political relationships and sustaining cash they needed to survive the clear-out, if and when reality strikes and everyone realizes that sci-fi outcome isn’t gonna happen, or isn’t gonna happen any time soon. What I’d like to talk about today is a recent decision by the US government to allow Nvidia to sell some of its high-powered chips to China, and why that decision is being near-universally derided by those in the know. — In early December 2025, after a lot of back-and-forthing on the matter, President Trump announced that the US government will allow Nvidia, which is a US-based company, to export its H200 processors to China. He also said that the US government will collect a 25% fee on these sales. The H200 is Nvidia’s second-best chip for AI purposes, and it’s about six-times as powerful as the H20, which is currently the most advanced Nvidia chip that’s been cleared for sale to China. The Blackwell chip that is currently Nvidia’s most powerful AI offering is about 1.5-times faster than the H200 for training purposes, and five-times faster for AI inferencing, which is what they’re used for after a model is trained, and then it’s used for predictions, decisions, and so on. The logic of keeping the highest-end chips from would-be competitors, especially military competitors like China, isn’t new—this is something the US and other governments have pretty much always done, and historically even higher-end gaming systems like Playstation consoles have been banned for export in some cases because the chips they contained could be repurposed for military things, like plucking them out and using them to guide missiles—Sony was initially unable to sell the Playstation 2 outside of Japan because it needed special permits to sell something so militarily capable outside the country, and it remained unsellable in countries like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea throughout its production period. The concern with these Nvidia chips is that if China has access to the most powerful AI processors, it might be able to close the estimated 2-year gap between US companies and Chinese companies when it comes to the sophistication of their AI models and the power of their relevant chips. Beyond being potentially useful for productivity and other economic purposes, this hardware and software is broadly expected to shape the next generation of military hardware, and is already in use for all sorts of wartime and defense purposes, including sophisticated drones used by both sides in Ukraine. If the US loses this advantage, the thinking goes, China might step up its aggression in the South China Sea, potentially even moving up plans to invade Taiwan. Thus, one approach, which has been in place since the Biden administration, has been to do everything possible to keep the best chips out of Chinese hands, because that would ostensibly slow them down, make them less capable of just splurging on the best hardware, which they could then use to further develop their local AI capabilities. This approach, however, also incentivized the Chinese government to double-down on their own homegrown chip industry. Which again is still generally thought to be about 2-years behind the US industry, but it does seem to be closing the gap rapidly, mostly by copying designs and approaches used by companies around the world. An alternative theory, the one that seems to be at least partly responsible for Trump’s about-face on this, is that if the US allows the sale of sufficiently powerful chips to China, the Chinese tech industry will become reliant on goods provided by US companies, and thus its own homegrown AI sector will shrivel and never fully close that gap. If necessary the US can then truncate or shut down those shipments, crippling the Chinese tech industry at a vital moment, and that would give the US the upper-hand in many future negotiations and scenarios. Most analysts in this space no longer think this is a smart approach, because the Chinese government is wise to this tactic, using it itself all the time. And even in spaces where they have plenty of incoming resources from elsewhere, they still try to shore-up their own homegrown versions of the same, copying those international inputs rather than relying on them, so that someday they won’t need them anymore. The same is generally thought to be true, here. Ever since the first Trump administration, when the US government started its trade war with China, the Chinese government has not been keen on ever relying on external governments and economies again, and it looks a lot more likely, based on what the Chinese government has said, and based on investments across the Chinese market on Chinese AI and chip companies following this announcement, that they’ll basically just scoop up as many Nvidia chips as they can, while they can, and primarily for the purpose of reverse-engineering those chips, speeding up their gap-closing with US companies, and then, as soon as possible, severing that tie, competing with Nvidia rather than relying on it. This is an especially pressing matter right now, then, because the US economy, and basically all of its growth, is so completely reliant on AI tech and the chips that are allowing that tech to move forward. If this plan by the US government doesn’t pan out and ends up being a short-term gain situation, a little bit of money earned from that 25% cut the government takes, and Ndvidia temporarily enriching itself further through Chinese sales, but in exchange both entities give up their advantage, long term, to Chinese AI companies and the Chinese government, that could be bad not just for AI companies around the world, which could be rapidly outcompeted by Chinese alternatives, but also all economies exposed to the US economy, which could be in for a long term correction, slump, or full-on depression. Show Notes https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/us/politics/trump-nvidia-ai-chips-china.html https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/us-taking-25-cut-of-nvidia-chip-sales-makes-no-sense-experts-say/ https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about-weaponized-consoles-almost-sunk-the-ps2 https://archive.is/20251211090854/https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-open-up-exports-nvidia-h200-chips-china-semafor-reports-2025-12-08/ https://theconversation.com/with-nvidias-second-best-ai-chips-headed-for-china-the-us-shifts-priorities-from-security-to-trade-271831 https://www.economist.com/business/2025/12/09/donald-trumps-flawed-plan-to-get-china-hooked-on-nvidia-chips https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3335900/chinas-moore-threads-unveil-ai-chip-road-map-rival-nvidias-cuda-system https://www.investopedia.com/nvidia-just-became-the-first-usd5-trillion-company-monitor-these-crucial-stock-price-levels-11839114 https://aventis-advisors.com/ai-valuation-multiples/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe