1/ We are entering a period in world history where long-standing territorial disputes—so-called “frozen conflicts” mediated for years by the credible force of American intervention—are igniting in violence.
2/ The chaos in Nagorno-Karabakh could easily get out of control and spread beyond the borders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, becoming yet another proxy war that ropes in Turkey, Russia, and possibly Iran.
3/ There are many such flashpoints around the world. The Taiwan Strait is another. Any breakout in violence there could quickly rope in the United States and its Asian partners into a full-blown military conflict with China.
4/ The last time the world faced such danger was in the lead-up to WWI, with its interlocking alliance structures, or subsequently, during the inter-war years when economic hardship, populism, and rearmament turned Europe into a wasteland of death & destruction.
5/ We may be at greater risk of annihilation today. Like the period pre-1914, the western world has become accustomed to peace & prosperity.
Complacency combined w/a revolution in the technology of war-making has laid the groundwork for the most destructive war in human history.
6/ Likewise, the financial dislocations, mounting debts, and political baggage left unresolved after 10 yrs of economic "expansion" in western countries raises the specter of domestic upheaval & revolution seen during the interwar period—a dynamic that can be equally destructive.
7/ Nowhere is this dynamic playing out with greater consequence than in the US.
As we head into an election that may not produce a clear winner—only civil unrest & political crisis—the risk of international conflict grows by orders of magnitude.
We are at a perilous crossroads.
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In this @HiddenForcesPod, @Gavekal's CEO @gave_vincent joins me to discuss de-dollarization, U.S. re-industrialization, and his case for a Chinese “deflationary boom” and revaluation of the renminbi.
I ask Louis about the most important trends set to define the investment landscape in the years ahead and why he believes that the U.S. and Europe are set to undergo long periods of structurally high inflation while China’s economy is set to experience a “deflationary boom.”
2/4
In the second hour, we discuss the American imperial model of dollar recycling, why it is unsustainable, and why Louis thinks de-dollarization is a prerequisite for the re-industrialization of the United States.
We also discuss whether or not America needs an industrial ...
3/4
I’m starting a regimen of hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) and will be documenting parts of this journey in my weekly newsletter and on the Hidden Forces podcast.
Here's some background on why I've decided to grow my brain.
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Most of you already know that I’m a brain tumor survivor. I underwent brain surgery, followed by six weeks of daily stereotactic radiotherapy (SRT) to cure a debilitating tumor whose symptoms included dementia, anterograde amnesia, and general cognitive decline.
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I wrote about my experience for The Atlantic’s Quartz Magazine in 2015, and the CBC did a short documentary about it for those interested in learning more.
It's intersting how COVID-19, the Ukraine war, and now, Israel-Palestine are causing rifts and realignments on the hard left & right as everyone tries to figure out where the majority of the country is and what interlocking set of positions can create a winning coalition in 2024.
It's also interesting to see how certain unaligned people become totem poles around which this homeless mass of voters can congregate and find common cause and understanding.
We've seen this with Trump, Tulsi, RFK, Tucker, Peterson, Elon, Vivek, and even Norman Finkelstein.
Normally, the parties select the candidates and we have to decide which one we hate the least.
Instead, what we have here is some combination of the social media-driven crowd and a new coalition of private interests sourcing and proposing potential leaders for the movement.
It’s been a year since we launched the Hidden Forces Genius community and in this thread, I share some thoughts about what this experience has been like for me and what comes next.
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Victory Lap
It’s hard to believe how far we’ve come. I don’t just mean the Hidden Forces podcast. I mean the entire podcast industry.
When I started listening to podcasts more than a decade ago, hardly anyone even knew what they were; even fewer were actually listening.
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In 2013, just over 1 in 10 Americans twelve years of age and older said they had listened to a podcast in the past month. Today, just under 1 in 3 said they have listened to a podcast in the last week.
That’s a huge change in a country of more than 334 million people.
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While delivering a speech to the United Nations only weeks before the fifty-year anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that his country was “on the cusp of a historic peace agreement” with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
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“Such a peace will go a long way to ending the Arab-Israeli conflict,” he said, “But there’s a fly in this ointment, because rest assured, the fanatics ruling Iran will do everything they can to thwart this historic peace.”
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Weeks later that peace was shattered when more than 1,400 people were killed and some 200 more were taken hostage by the terrorist group Hamas on the single deadliest day in Israel’s history.
Since that attack Israeli forces have launched thousands of air bombardments in ...
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At the turn of the century, the West was in a state of celebration. Not only had we won the Cold War, but there was a feeling that history had reached its final conclusion.
Capitalism won, the free market reigned supreme, and the US sat atop a New World Order that was ...
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... liberal, market-oriented, and democratic.
Where did everything go wrong and why does it feel like the world is coming apart?
REASON #1: THE Culture War
America has always been a land of contradictions. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the country’s ...
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... conflicted relationship between tradition & progress.
While today’s culture wars and the more extreme demands of many so-called “social justice warriors” may seem unprecedented, they are only the latest manifestations of what historian Richard Hofstadter described as ...
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