The murder of United Healthcare's CEO sits at the intersection of several notable forces shaping Western societies:

1⃣ Popular Revoltism (in this case, Leftist revoltism)

2⃣ Celebration of violence, including targeted assassinations

3⃣ Alternate reality games

Short 🧵👇🏼 The alt-reality game component interests me the most.

I was first introduced to this concept by @JonAskonas in his 2022 @tnajournal article, "Reality Is Just a Game Now," and I see it popping up in more and more places.



2/thenewatlantis.com/publications/r…

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.

In the first hour, I ask Louis about the ...

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hiddenforces.io/podcasts/china… 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

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.

🧵👇🏼 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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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.

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.

🧵👇🏻 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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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.

👇🏼🧵 “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.”

2/

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 ...

👇🏻🧵





... 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 ...

2/

As Americans, we like to think of our rights as inalienable. But the only reason we have the luxury to think this way is because we have secured these rights by building strong civic institutions, and most importantly, through the use and credible use of force.

👇🏼🧵 (1/15) Beneath the larger tragedy of the last few days' events protrudes an uncomfortable truth about the nature of social order, and it is this: "might makes right."

Moral arguments are largely irrelevant when it comes to questions of national survival and the Israelis have ...

2/

In the aftermath of the global pandemic, with international trade flows in disarray, a narrative around deglobalization and the need to re-shore supply chains in strategic industries began to take hold.

A 🧵 about the myths vs. reality of US-China decoupling.

👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼 Building off the momentum created by the US-China Trade War and the popularity of nationalist economic policies that place U.S. industrial strength & trade reciprocity at the top of the agenda, the case for strategic decoupling continues to gain strong, bipartisan support.

2/21

China’s recent naval drills in the Pacific are yet another reminder of the threat that its rise poses to the US-led international order.

As the U.S. pours its finite resources into fighting a proxy war against Moscow in Ukraine, the leadership in Beijing prepares for war.

🧵👇🏼





There are three primary reasons why the U.S. may be unprepared to win a war against China over Taiwan:

1⃣ Domestic Fragmentation

2⃣ The War in Ukraine

3⃣ Lack of Industrial Readiness

The fmr. Chief Economist at the @USOCC, Charles Calomiris, speaks with me about why he believes that the government is likely to enact new and more onerous forms of financial repression, including commandeering the US banking system to fund itself.

1/🧵

hiddenforces.io/podcasts/fisca… In the first hour, Calomiris and I discuss the history of US bank policy and the unique characteristics of the American political economy that inform how the nation responds to political crises, including the populist temptation to resolve them through the US banking system.

2/x

My conversation last week w/@agnostoxxx about the most important questions that concern investors and policymakers left me reflecting on the unlikely parallels between my guest’s role as an investor and mine as a media entrepreneur.

A thread about the integrity of process 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻 What I found especially relatable in my conversation with Le Shrub are the challenges inherent in making sense of a complex environment and how one should go about holding positions in the face of uncertainty.

Here are 3 guiding principles that stood out to me:

I'm joined on @HiddenForcesPod by the man behind one of the funniest and most clever anonymous accounts on fintwit.

@agnostoxxx and I spend most of the first hour discussing his background, investment philosophy, and his process for coming up with ...

hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-w… ... new trade ideas, as well as his experience shorting the housing market in '08 as part of a famous team known for “The Big Short.” What he learned from that experience and how it applies to today’s markets is also part of that conversation.

The rest of the episode is ...

2/x

"In the modern world, we are very attached to the idea of progress. Time is linear. It started somewhere and it's going to end somewhere. We are always progressing towards something.
 
What this means however is that you have nothing in common with your parents. You have …
 
1/x ... nothing in common with your kids. Because you are at a higher level and your kids will be at a higher level than you, etc.
 
Traditional societies that embraced cyclical time did not have that feeling of isolation. You were always reenacting something an ancestor did.
 
2/x

When Democrats had their world turned upside down by Trump's election they reached for ridiculous explanations featuring pee-pee tapes & porn stars.

Many Republicans today are convinced that the pandemic was a manufactured crisis designed to ...

1/🧵

quillette.com/2023/03/31/the… ... bring about a new totalitarianism run by a global elite who want to end democracy, abolish private property, and destroy the family.

I never bought into the Trump hysteria and I'm similarly skeptical of claims made about a "Great Reset." What interests me more is ...

2/4

Edward Chancellor, @EdinburghLoM, and @HelenHet20 join me in this @HiddenForcesPod to discuss the changing international economic & political order.

Many of these changes are being driven by the reversal of multi-decade trends in ...

1/🧵

hiddenforces.io/podcasts/new-p… ... demographics, globalization, and low-cost, carbon-based energy sources.

The ripple effects of these forces on inflation, risk rates, wealth & income distribution, national security, and the ruling legitimacy of national governments are already starting to materialize.

2/5

Lagarde delivered a speech yesterday that's worth paying close attention to.

The most important part IMO deals with the synthesis of monetary & fiscal policy in support of larger, strategic objectives at the national and supranational levels.

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youtube.com/live/L34iRiinR… The goal is to use fiscal policy (i.e., government spending by the Treasury) to make strategic investments in energy, defense, and other key sectors of the economy that help build resiliency in anticipation of further breakdowns in the international order and possibly war.

2/x

I continue to believe that markets are missing the bigger picture of what is happening here.

The Swiss government just engineered a bailout of its second-largest bank and it followed that up with a 50bp rate hike.

This is what credit rationing looks like.

🧵👇🏻 As governments increasingly back the liabilities of banks they will want a greater say in the allocation of their assets.

"The need for more central bank & government backing for liabilities in the past few weeks accelerates the capture of the system" to quote @EdinburghLoM

2/x

This describes the Fed's strategy IMO and captures what @EdinburghLoM has described as "credit rationing." The Bank Term Funding Program is part of this strategy.

The Fed chokes off credit to the economy via the interest rate channel while creating preferential lending ... ... facilities for banks.

Patchwork "solutions" like this one are more of what I think we can expect to see in a world where the financial transmission mechanisms of monetary policy are breaking down and where ...

Most people know @dr_mcgilchrist for authoring “The Master and His Emissary” a book about what we refer to as "the Divided Brain" and its role in the making of the modern world.

What follows is a thread about what I learned from speaking with him (and what you will too).

🧵👇🏻

https://twitter.com/kofinas/status/1632508001411117064

It is @dr_mcgilchrist's view that we have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality because we have depended on that aspect of our brains that is most adept at manipulating the world in order to bend it to our purposes.

This is the same part of our brains that is ...

The last few years have been characterized by a growing sense of bewilderment, anger, and distrust.

Distrust in institutions, in each other, and in ourselves—in our capacities to apprehend reality and come to consensus on the nature of our world.

🧵/x

hiddenforces.io/podcasts/whats… What are the forces that have conspired to break consensus reality? And what are the larger implications of this shift for humanity and the world?

These are questions that my guest @JonAskonas and I discuss in this week's episode of @HiddenForcesPod.

We spend the first hour ...