Information is everywhere, Insight is power

More rational than you think…. The first thing to understand is that technology without human psychology creates, at best, wildly mismanaged efforts. At worst it’s downright dangerous. So my first thought when Dario Amodei announced that 5% of Anthropic stock would go toward a “public benefit fund” was that it sounded like a cross between Trump’s plan to pay every one $5,000 to vote Republican and George Costanza’s Human Fund. Something performative and vague to get through a

… Neither will the Customer Thanks to one war or another, Russian oil is (mostly) off the open global market, Iran’s oil blocked and the other Gulf petro-states are at three quarters the old capacity. And somehow, said dumpster fire is going to present you with a bill. One problem with today’s geopolitical dumpster fire is that launching attack drones at oil tankers is so much more distracting than a turf war between shipping and procurement - which is more likely to blow up

Libya was a terrifying case study on fragile systems that applies as much to the C-Suite as much as it does to geopolitics.

Both Washington and Tehran claim the war will be over soon, as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States look to be settling in for a long siege. They may be on to something.

The China example here isn’t terribly complicated, it’s just enormous. The country’s lopsided industrial overcapacity is at a tipping point that its anemic domestic market can’t absorb.

I’ve never been sold on the idea that theology is a sound basis for foreign policy. In my experience, the Almighty has never been that easy to push around. Your milage may vary.

Iran finally closed the Strait of Hormuz to watch global oil prices climb, but not enough to destroy demand. Now that the spigot has been closed, Iran can’t close it more.

Iran's talk of a Hormuz deal is a loud declaration that it is going to the mattresses.

It looks like social media is set to be the 8-Track of news media - an innovation not as convenient as advertised and ill-suited for the medium.

This isn’t a peace, but setting a pot on simmer. It’s also better than the alternative.

America can keep this asymmetrical wheel spinning much longer than Tehran can. Practically, maybe not.

From the Department of Unintended Consequences The possible endgames in Iran are starting to look like a Waffle House menu at 3am: Everything will probably give you heartburn, but booze and hunger make people optimistic. The administration is now using phrases like “degrade capability,” “strategic reset,” and “regional stabilization” for the same reason that CEOs do – use enough syllables and it’s less obvious that you’re pin-wheeling. The assumption is that if sufficient pre

If you want to look smart, be a pessimist; if you want to be rich, be an optimist.

What was supposed to be a “night in Caracas” operation to decapitate a regime has become a Mexican stand-off.

Tehran has discovered a deep vulnerability at the heart of the global order.

White House luxuriate in unpredictable chaos. Exactly what China’s current entrenched model needs to avoid.

Double whammy verdicts are barely a rounding error for Meta. The knock-ons will be worse.

Four weeks into the current war, the regime’s only hope to increase leverage on Washington is to isolate it politically and win the optics war. Which, given the unprovoked nature of the attack and the fact that all our allies hate us, shouldn’t have been too hard. Save for a glaring miscalculation.

On March 8, around the time that the Swedish navy was impounding its first Russian “shadow fleet” carrier, Britain was considering sending an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf. President Trump responded “That’s OK Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer. We don’t need people that join Wars after they’ve already Won!” Creative grammar aside, days later the White House was calling on Britain, along with France, Japan and South Korean – and China - to help the U

A Weekend Thought Experiment I was mooning around a hospital in the sunny Shi’a south of Iraq when a young doctor flagged me down and politely asked why were we - meaning Americans – there. He’d watched us invade his country twice before toppling the government and dismantling all the systems that ran the country. As far as he could tell, he gently explained, there had been no plan for after we’d blown the place up. The poor guy wasn’t even mad, he was just baffled on a cosm