Let's Know Things

• Vibe Coding

  This week we talk about Studio Ghibli, Andrej Karpathy, and OpenAI.We also discuss code abstraction, economic repercussions, and DOGE.Recommended Book: How To Know a Person by David BrooksTranscriptIn late-November of 2022, OpenAI released a demo version of a product they didn’t think would have much potential, because it was kind of buggy and not very impressive compared to the other things they were working on at the time. This product was a chatbot interface for a generative AI model they had been refining, called ChatGPT.This was basically just a chatbot that users could interact with, as if they were texting another human being. And the results were good enough—both in the sense that the bot seemed kinda sorta human-like, but also in the sense that the bot could generate convincing-seeming text on all sorts of subjects—that people went absolutely gaga over it, and the company went full-bore on this category of products, dropping an enterprise version in August the following year, a search engine powered by the same general model in October of 2024, and by 2025, upgraded versions of their core models were widely available, alongside paid, enhanced tiers for those who wanted higher-level processing behind the scenes: that upgraded version basically tapping a model with more feedstock, a larger training library and more intensive and refined training, but also, in some cases, a model that thinks longer, than can reach out and use the internet to research stuff it doesn’t already know, and increasingly, to produce other media, like images and videos.During that time, this industry has absolutely exploded, and while OpenAI is generally considered to be one of the top dogs in this space, still, they’ve got enthusiastic and well-funded competition from pretty much everyone in the big tech world, like Google and Amazon and Meta, while also facing upstart competitors like Anthropic and Perplexity, alongside burgeoning Chinese competitors, like Deepseek, and established Chinese tech giants like Tencent and Baidu.It’s been somewhat boggling watching this space develop, as while there’s a chance some of the valuations of AI-oriented companies are overblown, potentially leading to a correction or the popping of a valuation bubble at some point in the next few years, the underlying tech and the output of that tech really has been iterating rapidly, the state of the art in generative AI in particular producing just staggeringly complex and convincing images, videos, audio, and text, but the lower-tier stuff, which is available to anyone who wants it, for free, is also valuable and useable for all sorts of purposes.Just recently, at the tail-end of March 2025, OpenAI announced new multimodal capabilities for its GPT-4o language model, which basically means this model, which could previously only generate text, can now produce images, as well.And the model has been lauded as a sort of sea change in the industry, allowing users to produce remarkable photorealistic images just by prompting the AI—telling it what you want, basically—with usually accurate, high-quality text, which has been a problem for most image models up till this point. It also boasts the capacity to adjust existing images in all sorts of ways.Case-in-point, it’s possible to use this feature to take a photo of your family on vacation and have it rendered in the style of a Studio Ghibli cartoon; Studio Ghibli being the Japanese animation studio behind legendary films like My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke, among others.This is partly the result of better capabilities by this model, compared to its precursors, but it’s also the result of OpenAI loosening its policies to allow folks to prompt these models in this way; previously they disallowed this sort of power, due to copyright concerns. And the implications here are interesting, as this suggests the company is now comfortable showing that their models have been trained on these films, which has all sorts of potential copyright implications, depending on how pending court cases turn out, but also that they’re no long being as precious with potential scandals related to how their models are used.It’s possible to apply all sorts of distinctive styles to existing images, then, including South Park and the Simpsons, but Studio Ghibli’s style has become a meme since this new capability was deployed, and users have applied it to images ranging from existing memes to their own self-portrait avatars, to things like the planes crashing into the Twin Towers on 9/11, JFK’s assassination, and famous mass-shootings and other murders.It’s also worth noting that the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki, has called AI-generated artwork “an insult to life itself.” That so many people are using this kind of AI-generated filter on these images is a jarring sort of celebration, then, as the person behind that style probably wouldn’t appreciate it; many people are using it because they love the style and the movies in which it was born so much, though. An odd moral quandary that’s emerged as a result of these new AI-provided powers.What I’d like to talk about today is another burgeoning controversy within the AI space that’s perhaps even larger in implications, and which is landing on an unprepared culture and economy just as rapidly as these new image capabilities and memes.—In February of 2025, the former AI head at Tesla, founding team member at OpenAI, and founder of an impending new, education-focused project called Eureka Labs named Andrej Karpathy coined the term ‘vibe coding’ to refer to a trend he’s noticed in himself and other developers, people who write code for a living, to develop new projects using code-assistant AI tools in a manner that essentially abstracts away the code, allowing the developer to rely more on vibes in order to get their project out the door, using plain English rather than code or even code-speak.So while a developer would typically need to invest a fair bit of time writing the underlying code for a new app or website or video game, someone who’s vibe coding might instead focus on a higher, more meta-level of the project, worrying less about the coding parts, and instead just telling their AI assistant what they want to do. The AI then figures out the nuts and bolts, writes a bunch of code in seconds, and then the vibe coder can tweak the code, or have the AI tweak it for them, as they refine the concept, fix bugs, and get deeper into the nitty-gritty of things, all, again, in plain-spoken English.There are now videos, posted in the usual places, all over YouTube and TikTok and such, where folks—some of whom are coders, some of whom are purely vibe coders, who wouldn’t be able to program their way out of a cardboard box—produce entire functioning video games in a matter of minutes.These games typically aren’t very good, but they work. And reaching even that level of functionality would previously have taken days or weeks for an experienced, highly trained developer; now it takes mere minutes or moments, and can be achieved by the average, non-trained person, who has a fundamental understanding of how to prompt AI to get what they want from these systems.Ethan Mollick, who writes a fair bit on this subject and who keeps tabs on these sorts of developments in his newsletter, One Useful Thing, documented his attempts to make meaning from a pile of data he had sitting around, and which he hadn’t made the time to dig through for meaning. Using plain English he was able to feed all that data to OpenAI’s Deep Research model, interact with its findings, and further home in on meaningful directions suggested by the data.He also built a simple game in which he drove a firetruck around a 3D city, trying to put out fires before a competing helicopter could do the same. He spent a total of about $13 in AI token fees to make the game, and he was able to do so despite not having any relevant coding expertise.A guy named Pieter Levels, who’s an experienced software engineer, was able to vibe-code a video game, which is a free-to-play, massively multiplayer online flying game, in just a month. Nearly all the code was written by Cursor and Grok 3, the first of which is a code-writing AI system, the latter of which is a ChatGPT-like generalist AI agent, and he’s been able to generate something like $100k per month in revenue from this game just 17 days, post-launch.Now an important caveat here is that, first, this game received a lot of publicity, because Levels is a well-known name in this space, and he made this game as part of a ‘Vibe Coding Game Jam,’ which is an event focused on exactly this type of AI-augmented programming, in which all of the entrants had to be at least 80% AI generated. But he’s also a very skilled programmer and game-maker, so this isn’t the sort of outcome the average person could expect from these sorts of tools.That said, it’s an interesting case study that suggests a few things about where this category of tools is taking us, even if it’s not representative for all programming spaces and would-be programmers.One prediction that’s been percolating in this space for years, even before ChatGPT was released, but especially after generative AI tools hit the mainstream, is that many jobs will become redundant, and as a result many people, especially those in positions that are easily and convincingly replicated using such tools, will be fired. Because why would you pay twenty people $100,000 a year to do basic coding work when you can have one person working part-time with AI tools vibe-coding their way to approximately the same outcome?It’s a fair question, and it’s one that pretty much every industry is asking itself right now. And we’ve seen some early waves of firings based on this premise, most of which haven’t gone great for the firing entity, as they’ve then had to backtrack and starting hiring to fill those positions again—the software they expected to fill the gaps not quite there yet, and their offerings suffering as a consequence of that gambit.Some are still convinced this is the way things are going, though, including people like Elon Musk, who, as part of his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE efforts in the US government, is basically stripping things down to the bare-minimum, in part to weaken agencies he doesn’t like, but also, ostensibly at least, to reduce bloat and redundancy, the premise being that a lot of this work can be done by fewer people, and in some cases can be automated entirely using AI-based systems.This was the premise of his mass-firings at Twitter, now X, when he took over, and while there have been a lot of hiccups and issues resulting from that decision, the company is managing to operate, even if less optimally than before, with about 20% the staff it had before he took over—something like 1,500 people compared to 7,500.Now, there are different ways of looking at that outcome, and Musk’s activities since that acquisition will probably color some of our perceptions of his ambitions and level of success with that job-culling, as well. But the underlying theory that a company can do even 90% as well as it did before with just a fifth of the workforce is a compelling argument to many people, and that includes folks running governments, but also those in charge of major companies with huge rosters of employees that make up the vast majority of their operating expenses.A major concern about all this, though, is that even if this theory works in broader practice, and all these companies and governments can function well enough with a dramatically reduced staff using AI tools to augment their capabilities and output, we may find ourselves in a situation in which the folks using said tools are more and more commodified—they’ll be less specialized and have less education and expertise in the relevant areas, so they can be paid less, basically, the tools doing more and the humans mostly being paid to prompt and manage them. And as a result we may find ourselves in a situation where these people don’t know enough to recognize when the AI are doing something wrong or weird, and we may even reach a point where the abstraction is so complete that very few humans even know how this code works, which leaves us increasingly reliant on these tools, but also more vulnerable to problems should they fail at a basic level, at which point there may not be any humans left who are capable of figuring out what went wrong, since all the jobs that would incentivize the acquisition of such knowledge and skill will have long since disappeared.As I mentioned in the intro, these tools are being applied to images, videos, music, and everything else, as well. Which means we could see vibe artists, vibe designers, vibe musicians and vibe filmmakers. All of which is arguably good in the sense that these mediums become more accessible to more people, allowing more voices to communicate in more ways than ever before.But it’s also arguably worrying in the sense that more communication might be filtered through the capabilities of these tools—which, by the way, are predicated on previous artists and writers and filmmakers’ work, arguably stealing their styles and ideas and regurgitating them, rather than doing anything truly original—and that could lead to less originality in these spaces, but also a similar situation in which people forget how to make their own films, their own art, their own writing; a capability drain that gets worse with each new generation of people who are incentivized to hand those responsibilities off to AI tools; we’ll all become AI prompters, rather than all the things we are, currently.This has been the case with many technologies over the years—how many blacksmiths do we have in 2025, after all? And how many people actually hand-code the 1s and 0s that all our coding languages eventually write, for us, after we work at a higher, more human-optimized level of abstraction?But because our existing economies are predicated on a certain type of labor and certain number of people being employed to do said labor, even if those concerns ultimately don’t end up being too big a deal, because the benefits are just that much more impactful than the downsides and other incentives to develop these or similar skills and understandings arise, it’s possible we could experience a moment, years or decades long, in which the whole of the employment market is disrupted, perhaps quite rapidly, leaving a lot of people without income and thus a lot fewer people who can afford the products and services that are generated more cheaply using these tools.A situation that’s ripe with potential for those in a position to take advantage of it, but also a situation that could be devastating to those reliant on the current state of employment and income—which is the vast, vast majority of human beings on the planet.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Corphttps://devclass.com/2025/03/26/the-paradox-of-vibe-coding-it-works-best-for-those-who-do-not-need-it/https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-benevolent-artificial-intelligence/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/what-could-possibly-go-wrong-doge-to-rapidly-rebuild-social-security-codebase/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_codinghttps://www.newscientist.com/article/2473993-what-is-vibe-coding-should-you-be-doing-it-and-does-it-matter/https://nmn.gl/blog/dangers-vibe-codinghttps://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/is-vibe-coding-with-ai-gnarly-or-reckless-maybe-some-of-both/https://devclass.com/2025/03/26/the-paradox-of-vibe-coding-it-works-best-for-those-who-do-not-need-it/https://www.creativebloq.com/3d/video-game-design/what-is-vibe-coding-and-is-it-really-the-future-of-app-and-game-developmenthttps://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/openais-new-ai-image-generator-is-potent-and-bound-to-provoke/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ghibli 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

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  18:48
• Tesla Protests

  This week we talk about Elon Musk, deportations, and the First Amendment.We also discuss electric vehicles, free speech, and Georgia.Recommended Book: Red Rising by Pierce BrownTranscriptGreenpeace is a protest-focused, environmentalist nongovernmental organization that was originally founded in Canada in the early 1970s, but which has since gone on to tackle issues ranging from commercial whaling to concerns about genetic engineering, worldwide.They have 26 independent organizations operating across nearly 60 countries, and their efforts are funded by a combination of grants and donations from individual supporters; and that’s an important detail, as they engage in a lot of highly visible acts of protest, many of which probably wouldn’t be feasible if they had corporate or government funders.They piss a lot of people off, in other words, and even folks who consider themselves to be environmentalists aren’t always happy with the things they do. Greenpeace is vehemently anti-nuclear, for instance, and that includes nuclear power, and some folks who are quite green in their leanings consider nuclear power to be part of the renewable energy solution, not something to be clamped down on. The same is true of their other stances, like their protests against genetic engineering efforts and their at times arguably heavy-handed ‘ecotage’ activities, which means sabotage for ecological purposes, to making their point and disrupt efforts, like cutting down forests or building new oil pipelines, that they don’t like.Despite being a persistent thorn in the side of giant corporations like oil companies, and despite sometimes irritating their fellow environmentalists, who don’t always agree with their focuses or approaches, Greenpeace has nonetheless persisted for decades in part because of their appreciation for spectacle, and their ability to get things that might otherwise be invisible—like whaling and arctic oil exploration—into the press. This is in turn has at times raised sufficient awareness that politicians have been forced to take a stand on things they wouldn’t have otherwise been forced to voice an opinion on, much less support or push against, and that is often the point of protests of any size or type, by any organization.A recent ruling by a court in North Dakota, though, could hobble this group’s future efforts. A company involved in the building of the Dakota Access pipeline accused Greenpeace of defamation, trespass, nuisance, civil conspiracy, and other acts, and has been awarded about $667 million in damages, payable by Greenpeace, because of the group’s efforts to disrupt the construction of this pipeline.The folks at the head of Greenpeace had previously said that a large payout in this case could bankrupt the organization, and while there’s still a chance to appeal the ruling, and they’ve said they intend to do so, this ruling is already being seen as a possible fulcrum for companies, politicians, and government agencies that want to limit protests in the US, where the right to assemble and peaceably express one’s views are constitutionally protected by the first amendment, but where restrictions on protest have long been used by government officials and police to stifle protests they don’t like for various reasons.What I’d like to talk about today is another, somewhat unusual wave of protests we’re seeing in the US and to some degree globally right now, too, and the larger legal context in which these protests are taking place.—When US President Trump first stepped into office back in early 2017, there were protests galore, huge waves of people coming out to protest the very idea of him, but especially his seeming comfort with, and even celebration of, anti-immigration, racist, and misogynistic views and practices, including his alleged sexual abuse and rape of dozens of women, one of whom successfully took him to court on the matter, winning a big settlement for proving that he did indeed sexually assault her.The response to his second win, and his ascension to office for another term in 2025, has been more muted. There have been a lot of protests, but not at the scale of those seen in 2017. Instead, the majority of enthusiasm for protest-related action against this administration has been aimed at Elon Musk, a man who regularly tops the world’s richest people lists, owns big-name companies like SpaceX and Tesla, and who has his own collection of very public scandals and alleged abuses.One such scandal revolves around Musk’s decision to plow hundreds of millions of dollars into getting Trump reelected. As a result of that investment, he was brought into the president’s confidence, and now serves as a sort of hatchet-man via a pseudo-official agency called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.Musk and his team have been jumping from government agency to government agency, conducting mass firings, harassing employees, hacking and by some accounts stealing and deleting all sorts of sensitive data, and generally doing their best to cause as much disruption as possible. Many of their efforts have been pushed back against, eventually, by courts, but that’s only after a lot of damage has already been done.The general theory of their operation is ostensibly to cut costs in the US government, and though outside analysts and watchdogs have shown that they haven’t really managed to do that on any scale, and that their actions will probably actually add to the government’s deficit, not reduce it, Musk and Trump claim otherwise, and that’s enough for many people in their orbit. The unsaid purpose of this group, though, seems to be making the government so ineffective and hollow that businesses, like Musk’s and those of his friends, can step in and do things that were previously done by government agencies, and can reap massive profits as a consequence; folks having to pay more for what was previously provided by the government, and a bunch of rich folks profiting because they’re the only ones capable of providing such services, now that the agencies have been gutted.The courts are still scrambling, as they move a lot slower than individuals with seeming authority and the support of a vindictive president can move, but this has already caused a lot of consternation across the political spectrum, and Musk, though popular with a certain flavor of Republican and far-right voter, has pissed off a lot of more conventional Republicans, in addition to pretty much every Democrat.This is important context for understanding why the most vocal and enthusiastic protests in the US these first few months of 2025 have targeted Musk, and more specifically, Musk’s electric vehicle company, Tesla.Tesla was once celebrated by the political left as the EV company that made EVs sexy and popular, at a time in which this type of vehicle was anything but.Musk’s shift to the political far-right changed that, though, and the general theory of these protests is that Musk is mostly held financially afloat by Tesla’s huge market valuation: Tesla stocks are worth way more than those of other car companies, with a price multiple—how much the stock is worth, compared to how much business the company actually does, and how much their assets are worth—is more akin to that of a dotcom-era tech startup than a car company, the stock price valued at something like 120-times the apparent book value of the company.So Musk, who owns a lot of Tesla stock, can basically borrow money against that stock, and this allows him to tap tens of billions of dollars worth of borrowed money on a whim, because the banks know he’s good for it. In this way he can inflate his supposed worth while also getting liquid cash whenever he needs it, despite not having to sell those stocks he owns.This method of acquiring liquid wealth by leveraging non-liquid assets has allowed him to support Trump’s reascension, but it’s also allowed him to do things like buy Twitter, which he has renamed X and converted into a sort of voicebox for the right and far-right. It has also allowed him to do things like offer money to potential voters who are signed up to vote and who sign petitions that are supportive of far-right causes; which is not quite paying for votes, which is illegal in the US, but it is the closest thing to paying for votes you can get away with, and there’s still debate whether this is actually legal or not, but either way, until the courts catch on up this, too, he’s been able to influence vote outcomes to varying degrees because of that access to money.Some of the biggest and most consistent protesting efforts in the post-second-term-Trump US have revolved around Tesla, its cars, and its dealerships, and the theory of operation here is that by protesting Tesla, you might be able to decrease the company’s market valuation, which in turn decreases Musk’s access to money. Less market value for the company means Musk can’t borrow as much money against it, and if he has less access to liquid wealth, to cash rather than stocks and other illiquid assets, he may become less relevant in the administration, and less capable of influencing elections across the country (and to some degree the world, as he’s throwing money at candidates he favors globally, now, too).These protests have been traditional, in the sense of gathering peacefully outside Tesla dealerships, chanting slogans and carrying signs, but also of a more aggressive sort, including spraypainting Tesla vehicles, doing things to embarrass folks who own these cars, and in some few cases, setting them on fire or otherwise destroying them.The general idea, again, is to make the brand toxic, which in turn should reduce sales, and that, ideally, for the protestors, would then reduce Musk’s access to money, which he is using to influence elections and other such activities and outcomes.The administration has responded to these protests with a bizarre and, it’s generally agreed, pretty embarrassing car commercial for Tesla, held outside the White House, in which Trump claimed he was buying one, and told Americans to buy a car to support Tesla because it’s a wholesome American company.Trump also recently said that he would consider people caught defacing Teslas or even just protesting the brand in non-destructive ways to be domestic terrorists, which is a pretty chilling thought, as some post-9/11 rules about how the government can treat terrorists are still on the books; calling someone a terrorist is a means of doing away with due process and human rights, basically, so this is a threat to go full violent authoritarian on people using their first amendment rights in ways this administration doesn’t like.These protests are occurring within the context of another notable, protest-oriented storyline, one in which students who participated in protests against the US and Israel’s actions in Gaza at Columbia University in New York last spring have been arrested; one was on a visa to the US and was in the process of becoming a doctor—her visa has now been revoked—and the other, who has a green card, and who is thus a permanent US resident, and who has no criminal record, faces a case in immigration court in Louisiana, where he was shipped after being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.His hearing has been scheduled for April 8, and his lawyers are challenging both his detention and the government’s apparent efforts to make an example of him, trying to deport him and do away with his citizenship because he protested against the government’s actions.The administration is claiming they can do this, and can do a bunch of other stuff, including deporting immigrants who they claim, without evidence, are members of a Venezuelan gang; they say there’s legal precedent that gives them the ability to deport enemy aliens, those who are antagonistic to the US and its government, basically—the same sort of rulings that were used to justify deporting anyone sympathetic to the communist party back in the mid-to-late 20th century.This same concept is being floated to justify the deportation of some of the people who have protested against Israel’s and the US’s actions in Gaza, the accusation being that they are supporting Hamas and other organizations that have been declared terrorist organizations by the US, so when folks protest against these governments’ activities in the region, they’re also supporting the causes of terrorist organizations—which then arguably gives the US government the right to deport them, because they weren’t born in the US.The legality of all this is still being debated and working its way through the court system, but the ultimate goal seems to be giving the administration the ability to deport whomever they like, and establishing that immigrants of any kind don’t have the free speech rights that natural born US citizens enjoy; which isn’t concretely established in law, and which these many efforts and court cases are meant to sort out more formally.This administration has also shown itself to be just really antagonistic against any person or entity that defies or criticizes it, including journalistic entities, politicians, or protesting individuals; they’ve used lawsuits, executive orders, and a slew of other tools to legally punish, financially punish, and in many cases socially punish, telling their supporters that it would be a real shame if something happened to these people, seemingly aiming to scare their opponents, while also possibly sparking stochastic violence against them.And this isn’t a US-exclusive thing.In Georgia, the country not the state, the government is levying huge fines on people who protested against its pivot toward allying with Russia instead of moving toward the EU two years ago; they’re using a so-called “foreign agent bill” to accuse anyone who says or does something against the government of being paid by foreign entities, which in turn allows them to crack down on these people hard, while seemingly not violating their good, dedicated, patriotic citizens’ rights.They’ve also started levying fines for the equivalent of about $16,000 on those who participate in protests that even briefly block traffic, which is one more way to asymmetrically hobble people and organizations that might otherwise cause a regime trouble; anyone who does these things in their favor can just have these fines waived or ignored.We’re seeing similar things in Turkey and Hungary, right now, two other countries that have seen widescale protests and significant efforts by their governments to attack those protestors, to get them to stop. In some case these efforts backfire, leading to more and more substantial pushback by the population against increasingly aggressive and abusive regimes.It’s impossible to know ahead of time which way things will go, though, and right now, in the US, most of these anti-protestor efforts are still young, as are the anti-Tesla, anti-Musk protests, themselves. One side or the other could be forced to pivot by judicial rulings—though this could also lead to a long-predicted constitutional crisis, in which the judges say the government can’t do something they want to do, and the government just ignores that ruling, creating an entirely different and arguably more substantial problem.Show Noteshttps://apnews.com/article/columbia-protests-immigration-detention-mahmoud-khalil-755774045e5e82849e3281e8ff72f26dhttps://www.cnn.com/2025/03/21/middleeast/turkey-protests-erdogan-mayor-intl-latam/index.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/world/middleeast/turkey-ekrem-imamoglu-istanbul.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/world/middleeast/turkey-erdogan-democracy-istanbul-mayor-detention.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Turkish_protestshttps://apnews.com/article/turkey-mayor-jailed-istanbul-f962743f724f00a318f84ffaed7f58dehttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/us/politics/what-is-doge-elon-musk-trump.htmlhttps://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/protesters-gather-tesla-showrooms-dealerships-denounce-elon-musk-doge-rcna197595https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/nyregion/columbia-trump-concessions-watershed.htmlhttps://apnews.com/article/hungary-pride-ban-orban-lgbtq-rights-e7a0318b09b902abfc306e3e975b52dfhttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y0zrg9kpnohttps://www.reuters.com/world/europe/hungarys-president-signs-law-banning-pride-parade-despite-protests-2025-03-19/https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/hungarys-orban-vows-fast-crackdown-media-ngos-over-foreign-funding-2025-03-15/https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/15/europe/georgia-protests-authoritarianism-fears-intl-cmd/index.htmlhttps://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/03/georgia-authorities-freeze-accounts-of-organizations-supporting-protesters-to-kill-the-peaceful-protests/https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250323-georgia-cracks-down-on-pro-eu-protests-with-crippling-fineshttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/nyregion/mahmoud-khalil-trump-allegations.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/us/politics/spacex-contracts-musk-doge-trump.htmlhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/21/oil-protest-activism-greenpeace-dakota-pipeline-verdicthttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/greenpeace-lawsuit-energy-transfer-dakota-pipelinehttps://www.cnn.com/2025/03/18/climate/greenpeace-lawsuit-first-amendment/index.htmlhttps://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/what-to-know-about-greenpeace-after-it-was-found-liable-in-the-dakota-access-protest-casehttps://apnews.com/article/greenpeace-dakota-access-pipeline-lawsuit-verdict-5036944c1d2e7d3d7b704437e8110fbbhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeacehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_protest This is a public episode. 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  19:22
• US Market Uncertainty

  This week we talk about tariffs, consumer confidence, and trade wars.We also discuss inflation, GDP, and uncertainty.Recommended Book: A Brief History of Intelligence by Max S. BennettTranscriptOn January 20, 2025, mere hours after being sworn into his second term in office as President of the United States, Donald Trump announced new 25% tariffs on most incoming goods from Canada and Mexico, accusing the two allies of failing to halt the flow of drugs and illegal migrants into the US. These tariffs would go into effect on February 1, he said, and they would be in addition to existing tariffs that were already in effect for specific import categories.On that same day, he also speculated that he might impose a universal tariff on all imports, saying that he believed all countries, allies or not, were taking advantage of the US, and he didn’t like that.Less than a week later, Trump announced that he would impose 25% tariffs on all good from Colombia, with immediate effect, and would double that tariff to 50% within a week. This appears to have been a punishment for the Colombian government’s decision to turn back planes full of immigrants the US government deported and sent their way, without approval from the intended recipient of those deported people, the Colombian government. There was a minor tiff between these governments, but the White House declared victory on the matter later that night, saying the tariffs would be held in reserve, implying they could come back at any time if their demands are not met.An executive order implementing the threatened 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico was signed on February 1, and a new 10% tariff on China went into effect the same day. Countermeasures were threatened by everyone involved, and after Trump published a social media post saying there would probably be economic pain for a while, his government agreed to a 30 day pause on tariffs for Mexico and Canada, while also threatening new tariffs against the European Union; another long-time US ally.The new 10% tariff on Chinese imports went into effect on February 4, and China retaliated with its own counter-tariffs on US goods, including things like farm machinery and energy products. It also implemented new restrictions on the export of rare earth minerals to the US—a category of raw materials everyone is scrambling to secure, as they’re vital for the production of batteries and other fundamental technologies—and they launched a new antimonopoly investigation into Google, which deals with some Chinese companies.On February 10, Trump reimposed a 25% tariff on all foreign steel and aluminum; a move that made US metal companies happy, but essentially all other US companies very unhappy, and in mid-February he threatened even more, broad, and vague tariffs on basically everyone, saying he’s doing what he’s doing in order to force companies to move manufacturing infrastructure back to the US, after decades of offshoring everything.At the end of February, Trump said the delayed tariffs on Canada and Mexico would go into effect, as planned, on March 4, alongside those new 10% tariffs on China. On that day, Canada implemented its own counter-tariffs on the US to the tune of 25% on about $155 billion of US goods imported by the country.Canada and Mexico send about 80% of their exports to the US market, so their economies are expected to be hit hard by this trade war. China, in contrast, only sends about 15% of its exports to the US, so the impact will be more tempered.These three countries, though, are the US’s largest trading partners, collectively accounting for over 40% of US imports and exports. In addition to buying a lot of US goods, they also export the majority of things like oil, beer, copper wire, chocolate, and other goods that the US consumes; and the cost of tariffs are almost always passed on to the end-consumer, so higher tariffs on these sorts of goods mean raised prices on a lot of stuff across the economy.On March 6, after a lot of back-and-forth with US automakers and with the Mexican and Canadian governments, a lot of the tariffs placed on goods from these countries were suspended, the US government denying that their withdrawal had anything to do with the US market, which was suffering in response to this wave of economic disruptions—though many tariffs were kept in place, and Trump said the US would still impose tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports beginning on March 12.On the 12th, the EU and Canada announced a new wave of retaliatory tariffs against the US, though the European side said they would hold off on their implementation of these tariffs, waiting till April 1 to see what happens. The next day, Trump threatened a 200% charge on alcoholic products from the EU in response to their planned 50% tariffs on US whiskey and other products within their borders.At the moment, as of mid-March 2025, a lot of these tariffs are still speculative, as it’s generally understood, from Trump’s bombastic approach to deal-making and his previous backtracking from these sorts of threats, that many of these tariffs could disappear, announced solely to provide leverage against those Trump wants to squeeze for more concessions and what he considers to be more favorable trade terms. Some of them could become concrete reality, though, and part of the issue here is that it’s nearly impossible to know which is which, because there also seems to be a larger effort to rewire the US and global economies by this administration—and that effort, plus the uncertainty caused by tariffs and similar actions, are leading to some pretty severe market upsets within the US, and resultantly around the world, as well.And that’s what I’d like to talk about today: the impacts of these tariffs and other actions by this administration, so far, and what might happen next, based on currently available numbers and analysis.—Economies are ridiculously complex systems, and it’s impossible to say with 100% certainty what caused what, and to what degree things would be different had some other path been taken by those in control of various regulatory and economic levers.That said, the nonpartisan Tax Foundation has estimated that just those first batch of proposed tariffs by the US government, not including impacts from foreign retaliations, which could be substantial, will reduce US GDP by about 0.4% and reduce total hours worked by the equivalent of 309,000 full-time jobs; so a lot less output, and a lot less overall productivity.That’s on top of the estimated 0.2% long-term decrease in US GDP caused by the first Trump administration’s tariffs, which were maintained by the subsequent Biden administration.These existing tariffs raised prices in the US and reduced both output and employment, which means the boom the US economy saw under the Biden administration might have been even boomier, had those tariffs been dropped. But now they’re more or less locked in, and these new tariffs will probably amplify their effect, near-term and long-term.On top of that, the constant threats and pullbacks and seemingly off-the-cuff decisions to implement what amounts to all sorts of huge-scale taxes on a frenetic array of goods, including luxuries, but also some very fundamental things, like the metals we use to build and manufacture basically everything, is stoking uncertainty throughout the US and global economies.That uncertainty has wide-ranging impacts, but one of the most direct consequences is that consumer sentiment in the US has nose-dived, as ordinary people worry about the combined impacts of tariffs, cuts to government programs, layoffs across government agencies, and new restrictions on immigration, which even ignoring the human element of such things can cause all sorts of issues across industries that rely on immigrant workers to stay afloat.In mid-March of this year, US consumer sentiment hit 57.9, down from 64.7 in February. That’s the lowest its been since November of 2022, it’s down 27% from a year earlier, and it’s a lot lower than economist predictions for this month, which were set at 63.2.Consumer sentiment tells us how people are feeling about the economy, about their potential to earn, and about where things are going. This influences how people spend, how they consume, and that in turn helps determine how the overall economy will go in the coming years, as people will be more likely to hunker down and save, taking as few risks as possible and making fewer purchases if they believe things will be rough; which in some cases can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because those behaviors tend to shrink the economy, which leads to less output, fewer investments being made, more layoffs, and so on. That means a drop in consumer sentiment can make things bad even if they would otherwise be good, but if they’re bad already, they can become even worse because folks stop doing things that would improve the economy, out of self-preservation.And that impact can be just as pronounced when things are weird and wobbly, rather than outright bad, as seems to be the case in the US at the moment.There’s no firm evidence that the US economy is destined for a recession at this point, but the Russell 2000 index, which is made up of smaller companies than indexes like the S&P 500, and which is thus more prone to on-the-ground variables than its larger index kin, has dropped more than 16% since November, when it hit a new high on optimism about what the new Trump administration might do for businesses and the economy.The S&P 500 also collapsed, though about half as much, and it rallied somewhat last week as investors bought the dip, scooping up stocks at lower prices following that drop. But there’s a lot of speculation that this might be a so-called dead cat bounce recovery—a moment in which a market seems to be recovering from a drop, but where it’s actually just bouncing up a little before heading back downward—and even this index, which is packed with corporations that are less susceptible to brief market wobbles than those in the Russell, might be heading for another downswing in the coming weeks, based on a lot of the economic numbers used to predict such things, at the moment.One such metric is interest in alternative assets like gold, and the price of gold hit a new high last Friday, surpassing $3,000 per ounce for the first time ever.That’s not something you tend to see when markets are healthy and people expect them to do well; if they are healthy and expected to surge rather than collapse, people tend to put their money in the market, not in shiny metals. But the shiny metals bet seems to be appealing right now, which hints at an even broader suspicion of the US economy than even that consumer sentiment and those bad market figures anticipate.And the market figures have been bad. In just 3 weeks, beginning on February 19, the S&P alone lost more than $5 trillion in value.The Atlanta Fed, which uses a fairly reliable model to predict future US GDP numbers, was predicting a healthy nearly 4% increase for the US’s GDP for the first quarter of 2025 back in late-January, early-February, but that prediction plummeted from positive 4% to negative 2.4% by early March.That figure could still change, as it’s informed by data that don’t all arrive at the same time, but it’s still a staggering drop, and it reflects the impact of all these tariffs, but also all the destruction of government programs and agencies, the mass firings, and of course the uncertainty caused by all of these things in aggregate, alongside the impacts of said uncertainty on everyone at all scales, from trade partners to US-based small businesses to individual consumers.So few people and institutions are happy about what’s happening right now, but it does look like, in the immediate future, at least, there are some beneficiaries of all this tumult.Markets in China are flourishing, especially Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index, which is up more than 20% since Trump’s inauguration on January 20. And Europe’s market, which has struggled with stasis for years now, is up more than 4% over that same period.Uncertainty about markets, but also military alliances, especially NATO, have pushed Germany—which has struggled since Russia invaded Ukraine, when their energy markets were utterly scrambled, which in turn hobbled their massive manufacturing base—Germany has unleashed a huge amount of government funds on their economy, and that big uptick in spending has helped basically the whole EU market grow. The German government has traditionally been tight-pocketed, but a declaration by the incoming Chancellor that they would do whatever it takes to both defend themselves and boost their economic outlook in the face of unreliable backing from their long-time ally, the US, has bolstered enthusiasm and optimism throughout the region, bringing EU nations closer together, increasing spending on all sorts of fundamentals, and bringing them closer to the Canadian government, as well.The Chinese government has recently indicated they’ll be injecting a bunch of money and other types of support in their economy, as well, which creates a stark contrast with the US government, which seems to be refocusing on pulling government resources from across society and the economy, and spending mostly on tax cuts for the wealthiest people and biggest companies, instead.The US government’s efforts to go America first, and not do anyone, even its longest-term, most reliable allies, any favors, or even trade in what might be considered a balanced way, thus seems to be scrambling US markets while simultaneously stoking those that are being cut off, unifying aspects of the rest of the world in antagonism against the US, while also providing them with incentive to reinvest in their own markets; which could be good for them long-term, making them less reliant on the US in all sorts of ways, but which seems pretty bad for the US in particular, short-term, and casts the US-dominated global order into disarray for the immediate future, with all sorts of consequences, economic and otherwise.The degree to which this impacts Trump’s approval ratings has yet to be seen, as while his approval is collapsing, especially on the economy, right now, a lot of the most serious economic impacts are expected to fall hard on regions that most enthusiastically voted for him, and Republican talking points have already pivoted toward messaging that implies suffering for a while is good and patriotic.That message might succeed and keep people on side even as their investments collapse and tariff-driven inflation hits their bottom-lines, or it might not. But it seems like the administration is ramping up for a version of austerity that doesn’t actually reduce the deficit, but instead takes a bunch of money from programs and investments that helped these areas, and moves it to other stuff that mostly helps fund tax cuts for wealthy allies of the administration—and that could come back to bite them, come election season.All of this is also happening in parallel to the many political maneuverings of the administration and its opposition, though, and just recently the Republican-held congress was able to pass a funding bill, moving a lot more authority and control to the White House; so whatever the short-term approval numbers show, none of this seems to be having much of a negative impact on Trump’s control of government. That could change, though, over the course of the next year, leading into 2026’s midterm election, when the makeup of congress could be influenced by these and similar decisions.Show Noteshttps://www.reuters.com/markets/us/futures-rise-after-volatile-week-consumer-data-tap-2025-03-14/https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/consumer-confidence-march-2025-drops-trump-trade-e7e0964dhttps://www.axios.com/2025/03/15/economic-indicators-recession-riskhttps://www.cnn.com/2025/03/14/investing/gold-price-today-3000-ounce-intl/index.htmlhttps://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/14/us-stock-market-loses-5-trillion-in-value-in-three-weeks.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/business/russell-2000-bear-market.htmlhttps://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnowhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/us/politics/stock-market-correction-trump-tariffs.htmlhttps://www.nfib.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/NFIB-SBET-Report-Feb.-2025.pdfhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/your-money/car-shopping-trump-tariffs-cfpb.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/business/trump-sp-500-stocks-europe-china.htmlhttps://archive.ph/GNPRfhttps://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/donald-trump/issues/economyhttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/15/business/economy/tariffs-trump-maps-voters.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/us/politics/trump-spending-bill-government-shutdown.htmlhttps://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/investing-stocks-risk-strategies-trump-policies-c4a5d3d9https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/trump-trade-tariffs-us-dollar-value-814cbe37https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-nasdaq-sp500-03-17-2025https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/16/wall-street-hoped-scott-bessent-would-keep-trump-in-check-he-had-other-ideas-00231771https://www.businessinsider.com/wall-street-mergers-acquisitions-ipos-hiring-slumps-trump-tariffs-2025-3https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/14/trump-trade-wars-consumer-sentiment-00230833https://archive.ph/fUKPshttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/business/economy/trump-tariff-timeline.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/business/energy-environment/trump-energy-oil-gas.htmlhttps://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tariffs-trade-war/ This is a public episode. 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  19:29
• Ukraine Conflict Implications

  This week we talk about Euromaidan, minerals deals, and propaganda.We also discuss European security, NATO, and the western-led world order.Recommended Book: Storm Front by Jim ButcherTranscriptIn February of 2014, pro-Russian protests racked parts of southeastern Ukraine and Russian soldiers, their uniforms and weapons stripped of flags and other identifying markers, occupied another part of Ukraine called Crimea.This was seemingly in response to Ukraine’s overthrow of its pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was toppled as part of the Euromaidan protests, which were themselves a response to Yanukovych deciding to aim for closer ties with Russia, rather than signing an association agreement with the EU, which would have committed Ukraine to several EU-oriented reforms, related to corruption, among other things, while also giving Ukrainians many new rights, including visa-free movement and access to the European Investment Bank, beginning a few years later, in 2017.This sudden pivot away from the EU and toward Russia didn’t go down well with the Ukrainian public, which had repeatedly shown it wanted to lean toward the west, and the Euromaidan protests were focused on weeding out government corruption; the existing government was accused of being all sorts of corrupt, and had also been accused of human rights abuses and allowing Russian oligarchs undo influence at the highest rungs of power; Yanukovych was in Russia’s pocket, basically, and his overthrow made Russia worry that they would lose control of their neighbor.So Russia moved in to take part of Ukraine, basically uncontested, both internally and externally—a lot of other governments made upset noises about this, but Russia gave itself cover by removing their flags from their personnel, and that gave them the ability to paint everything that happened as a natural uprising from within Ukraine, the people wanting freedom from their Ukrainian oppressors, and Russia was just supporting this cry to overthrow oppressive tyrants, because they’re very nice and love freedom.For the next eight years, the Ukrainian government fought separatist forces, funded and reinforced by the Russian government, in the southeastern portion of their country, while Russia expanded their infrastructure in Crimea, which again, they stole from Ukraine early on, and where they previously leased vital naval facilities from Ukraine; and those facilities are assumed to be a big part of why all this went down the way it did, as without said naval facilities, they wouldn’t have a naval presence in the Black Sea.Then, in February of 2022, after a multi-month buildup of troops and military hardware along their shared border, which they provided all sorts of excuses for, and which many commentators and governments around the world excused as just a bunch of saber-rattling, nothing to worry about, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, initially aiming for a blitzkrieg-like assault that was meant to take Ukraine’s capital city, Kyiv, and decapitate the country’s government within just days, at which point they could replace the government with someone who’s working for them, another puppet they controlled.As of the day I’m recording this, in early March of 2025, the war is still ongoing, though. And in the years since it began, it’s estimated that more than a million people have been killed or injured, while entire cities across Ukraine have been leveled and tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees have fled Russia’s forces as they’ve raped and pillaged and murdered their way across the Ukrainian countryside, those refugees leaving for destinations around the world, but creating a refugee crisis in nearby European nations like Poland and Germany, in particular.There’s been a lot of back and forth in this conflict, Russia initially thought to have a massive upper hand, probably winning within days, as intended, but then Ukraine held fast, Russia redeployed its troops and armor, Ukraine got some remarkable counter-attacks in, and then Russia started to reset its economy to allow for a more drawn-out conflict.As of early 2025, Russia is once against considered to have the upper-hand, and though Ukraine has been holding the line even in the most under-assault regions in the eastern portion of its territory, and has in recent weeks managed to take some Russian-held territory back, Russia’s comparably larger number of troops, its recent resupply of soldiers from North Korea, its larger economy and number of supply chains, and its relationships with entities like China and Iran, in addition to North Korea, all of which have been supplying it with things it needs to keep the war effort going, at length, have all conspired to put Ukraine on the back foot.Additionally, Ukraine is struggling, after this many years of total war, to refill empty boots and make do with whatever their allies can and will offer them, in terms of money, weapons, but also the basics, like food and fuel. They’ve been able to shore-up some limited aspects of their economy, and have innovated like crazy when it comes to things like drones and other fundamentals of asymmetric, defensive warfare, but right now at least, the larger forces swirling around in the geopolitical realm are making life difficult for Ukraine, and for those who are still supporting them.And that’s what I’d like to talk about today; the continuing conflict in Ukraine, but especially what’s happening on the sidelines, beyond the battle itself—and how those sideline happenings might lead to some fundamental changes in how Europe is organized, and the makeup of the modern world order.—At this point I’ve done probably half a dozen or more episodes on this conflict; it’s long-lasting, it’s big, it’s important locally, but also globally, and it’s been informing both geopolitical and economic outcomes since day one.Today I’d like to talk about some recent happenings, most of them from the past few months, that could prove impactful on the eventual outcome of this conflict, and might even determine when that end of fighting arrives.And at the center of these happenings is recently reelected US President Trump, who has always had a, let’s call it unusual, public appreciation for Russian President Putin, and the strongman image he and other global authoritarians wield, while at the same time not being a big fan of Ukrainian President Zelensky—perhaps in part because Trump called Zelensky back in 2019 to try to get him to come up with evidence supporting a debunked conspiracy theory about his opponent, Joe Biden’s administration, related to alleged impropriety in US-Ukrainian relations.Zelensky could find no such evidence, and when he told Trump there was nothing to be found, Trump blocked payments on $400 million worth of military aid for Ukraine, holding it hostage until Zelensky came up with what he wanted. This became a big scandal only after the fact, and before it could be made public or became known by congress via a whistleblower complaint, Trump released the money. This led to a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump later that year, which led to his impeachment for abusing his power and obstructing Congress—but he was then acquitted by the Republican-led Senate.This, it’s thought, may have colored Trump’s behavior toward Zelensky when the two men sat down, alongside several other US officials, including US Vice President JD Vance, to discuss a potential mineral deal between the US and Ukraine, which was based on an earlier deal that the Ukrainian government dismissed.The original deal basically required that Ukraine exploit its mineral wealth and put half of the money it makes from those minerals into a fund that would be used to pay the US back for the military assistance it’s provided so far, to the tune of $500 billion; which is quite a lot more than the $175 billion or so the US has spent on this conflict since Russia invaded, only $128 billion of which has directly aided the Ukrainian government, as opposed to funding US activities associated with the war, or supporting other affected countries thereabouts.So originally the US asked for more than double what’s been provided so far, in return, paid for by Ukraine’s mineral wealth, which includes a lot of the types of rare earth minerals that are vital for common modern technologies, like computers, batteries, and solar panels.That didn’t fly, mostly because it didn’t contain a security guarantee for Ukraine—the US saying it would protect them if necessary, basically, in exchange for this huge sum of money—so the new deal asked for $500 billion be placed in a fund, and that fund would be jointly controlled by the US and Ukraine, the funds used to rebuild the country after the war.50% of all revenues from Ukrainian natural resources newly exploited after the war, so not from existing mines and ports and such, would be put into this fund. Like the first time around, this deal didn’t include a security agreement from the US, but the general idea was that this fund would incentivize new investment in the area, and because Ukraine has a lot of unexploited mineral wealth, this could give the US a new source for these sorts of valuable raw materials that are currently mostly controlled by China, but which the US government is attempting to claim more of, now that it’s realized it’s way behind on locking down sources of these really important things.At the meeting where this second deal was meant to be signed, though, Zelensky flying to the US to sit down with Trump to make it happen, the President and Vice President more or less verbally attacked Zelensky, criticizing him for not being more overtly grateful, and telling him he was wrong when he said that Russia started the war by invading Ukraine.It was all pretty bizarre, and even folks in Trump’s own party seemed pretty puzzled by the whole thing, some of them calling it embarrassing, as Trump and Vance were basically parroting Putin’s propaganda that no one actually believes because they ignore easily verifiable facts.In any event, this led to a lot of fallout between the US and Ukrainian governments, with Trump suggesting he would lean more heavily on Ukraine to get them to accept peace on Russia’s terms, because the Ukrainians couldn’t see reason and accept his version of reality, essentially.Trump has also suggested that he’s been talking a lot with Putin, and that he believes Putin wants peace, and it’s time to end the war. Putin, for his part, has not seemed inclined to give up anything in order to achieve peace, and Russian attacks on Ukraine have increased in scale since Trump came into office, and even more so after talks about a supposed peace agreement began.All of which has had implications on the ground.In Ukraine, Ukrainian soldiers have had to operate with fewer resources, as Trump cut off additional funding and supply shipments, post-meeting. He recently ordered that the US not share intelligence with them, too, and they cut off the sharing of satellite imagery, which Ukraine has used to great effect to strike Russian targets from a distance.This has also had implications across Europe, though, as while Ukraine is being invaded now, there are concerns that if Putin gets away with taking part or all of Ukraine, he’ll go for other previous Soviet assets, next, maybe starting with the Baltic nations—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—and then tearing off chunks of Poland, Finland, or other neighbors that were previously part of the Soviet Union, like eastern Germany.The European Union, despite a fair bit of warning about Trump’s stance on the issue, and the possibility that he would return to office, has been seemingly dumbstruck by Trump’s sudden pivot away from supporting Ukraine, and away from NATO more broadly, toward a stance that favors Russia, instead. European governments have been scrambling to come up with an aid package that will replace some of what the US would have given, and have started sharing more intelligence, as well, including satellite imagery.It won’t be easy, though, as the US versions of these things, from monetary resources to eyes in the sky vastly outshine what even the combination of British, French, and German assets can offer—at least at this stage. And the US has traditionally handled the lion’s share of spending and building in these areas, shouldering the majority of NATO spending, because, well, it could, and that was a major premise of the post-WWII, western-led world order. The US said it would protect global capitalist democracies with its military might and nukes, if necessary, and European nations have been generally happy with this setup as it has generally allowed European governments to spend less money on their militaries and more on other stuff.That state of affairs seems to have ended, or at the very least become too unreliable to bet on, though, so EU nations are attempting to fill in the gaps left by the suddenly less-reliable-seeming US government, not just for Ukraine, but for themselves, as well.Poland’s president recently announced that he wants to develop nuclear weapons and wants every adult male to undergo military training, so the country can field an army 500,000-strong.The French president has said he wants to extend his country’s nuclear umbrella—guaranteed deterrence, basically, using nuclear weapons—to the whole of the EU. France has far fewer nukes than the US and Russia, but this captures a sense of the moment in the Union, where a bunch of currently underfunded militaries are realizing they might not be able to rely on the US in a pinch. And while they collectively have a lot more people and resources than Russia, Russia is fully mobilized and has shown itself to be willing to attack sovereign nations, whenever it pleases, caring a lot less for the human lives it spends, in the process, than is typical in western-style democracies.Even short of full-scale, out of nowhere invasions, Russia could pose a threat to European governments via asymmetrical routes. It’s been seemingly approving all sorts of espionage operations meant to increase immigration arrivals in European nations where immigration is already a hot-button issue, nudging politics to the far-right, and it’s allegedly been attacking infrastructure, in terms of hacking and just blowing stuff up, in order to sow discord and fear.As I mentioned earlier, too, part of Germany was previously held by the Soviet Union, and that same part of the country has recently voted heavily in favor of the country’s furthest-right party, which wants stronger ties with Russia. So while conventional military issues are at the forefront of discussion, right now, Russia’s long history of asymmetric warfare is also getting a fair bit of attention, as it could conceivably use these groups as a casus belli to attack, carving off pieces of its European neighbors and slowly incorporating them into its sphere of influence, similar to what it did in Ukraine, beginning in 2014; if eastern Germany supports Russia, it could fund and in other ways support uprising efforts in these regions, creating chaos and potentially even breaking off separatist states that would pull those regions into Russia’s orbit.It’s a tumultuous moment in this part of the world, then, in part because of the conflict that’s still ongoing—a much larger and more powerful nation having invaded its smaller, less-powerful neighbor. But it’s also tumultuous because of the implications of that conflict, especially if Russia comes out on top. If they win, there would seem to be a far greater chance of their deciding to keep the ball rolling, replicating a model that worked (without significant long-term consequences) across more neighboring nations.And if they can do that before Europe reinforces itself—assuming that’s what the EU does, as it can be difficult to get a bunch of people with a bunch of at times competing interests to agree on anything, and even more so when said agreement involves both money and potentially sending civilians into harm’s way—if Russia can get there before a new, restructured and reinforced Europe emerges, we could see another, similar conflict soon, and this one could be even more successful than the last, if Russia tweaks its formula to make it more effective, and European governments succumb to war weariness, exhausted by the war in Ukraine, in the meantime.Show Noteshttps://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-us-aid-going-ukrainehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Ukraine_scandalhttps://www.csis.org/analysis/breaking-down-us-ukraine-minerals-dealhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/08/world/europe/ukraine-russia-north-korea-kursk.htmlhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/03/08/zelensky-trump-fallout-ukraine/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/world/europe/ukraine-us-trump-military-support.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/us/politics/ukraine-zelensky-trump-russia.htmlhttps://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-dobropillya-us-intelligence-3d0bad105a93933e9cdaca5cf31fcf74https://mwi.westpoint.edu/no-substitute-for-victory-how-to-negotiate-from-a-position-of-strength-to-end-the-russo-ukraine-war/https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-leaders-cautiously-welcome-macrons-nuclear-umbrella-offer-2025-03-06/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/world/europe/bulgarians-guilty-spying-russia-uk.htmlhttps://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/08/europe-scrambles-to-aid-ukraine-after-us-intelligence-cutoff-00219678https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wpy9x890wohttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/keith-kellogg-ukraine-intelligence-sharing-pause/https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8yz5dk82wohttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/world/us-ukraine-satellite-imagery.htmlhttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c05m907r39qohttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/us/politics/trump-russia-sanctions-tariffs.htmlhttps://www.csis.org/analysis/ukraines-future-vision-and-current-capabilities-waging-ai-enabled-autonomous-warfarehttps://www.politico.eu/article/donald-tusk-plan-train-poland-men-military-service-russiahttps://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/03/08/poland-says-it-plans-to-give-every-adult-male-military-traininghttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/world/europe/ukraine-trump-minerals.htmlhttps://apnews.com/article/ten-days-that-upended-us-support-for-ukraine-8930c01a15910a7ad8a7f7c7fac9ba3ahttps://www.wsj.com/world/white-house-and-ukraine-close-in-on-deal-for-mineral-rights-e924c672https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-us-still-ironing-parts-191805611.htmlhttps://www.reuters.com/business/us-could-cut-ukraines-access-starlink-internet-services-over-minerals-say-2025-02-22/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/world/europe/ukraine-minerals-deal.htmlhttps://www.cnn.com/2025/02/26/europe/ukraine-us-mineral-resources-deal-explained-intl-latam/index.htmlhttps://www.spglobal.com/commodity-insights/en/news-research/latest-news/electric-power/122624-eu-moving-to-develop-infrastructure-for-nuclear-energy-expansion-officialshttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-07/european-stocks-see-most-inflows-in-decade-amid-defense-splurgehttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/business/ai-summit-paris.htmlhttps://apnews.com/article/germany-ukraine-debt-brake-economy-military-spending-74be8e96d8515ddddd53a99a69957651https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/03/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-drones-deaths.html?unlocked_article_code=1.2U4.b15Z.1EA4tDb_37Bqhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/world/europe/ukraine-russia-eastern-front-line.htmlhttps://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/military-balance/2025/02/combat-losses-and-manpower-challenges-underscore-the-importance-of-mass-in-ukraine/https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-7-2025https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidanhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union%E2%80%93Ukraine_Association_Agreementhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_Warhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine_(1_January_2025_%E2%80%93_present) This is a public episode. 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  21:13
• Blue Ghost Mission 1

  This week we talk about Luna 2, soft-landings, and Firefly Aerospace.We also discuss the private space launch industry, lunar landers, and regolith.Recommended Book: The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. CoreyTranscriptIn 1959, Luna 2, a Soviet impactor-style spacecraft, successfully reached the surface of the Moon—the first-ever human-made object to do so.Luna 2 was very of its era; a relatively simple device, similar in many ways to the better-known Sputnik satellite, but getting a craft to the moon is far more difficult than placing something in orbit around Earth, in part because of the distance involved—the Moon is about 30-Earth’s from the surface of the earth, that figure varying based on where in its elliptical orbit it is at the moment, but that’s a good average, around 239,000 miles which is about 384,000 km, while Sputnik’s orbit only took it something like 359 miles, around 578 km from the surface. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 670-times the distance.So new considerations, like fuel to get there, but also charting paths to the moon that would allow the human-made object to actually hit it, rather than flying off into space, and even figuring out whether craft would need to be designed differently if they made it out of Earth’s magnetic field, were significant hurdles that had to be leapt to make this mission a success; everything was brand new, and there were gobs of unknowns.That said, this craft didn’t settle onto the moon—it plowed into it like a bullet, a so-called ‘hard landing.’ Which was still an astonishing feet of research and engineering, as at this point in history most rockets were still blowing up before making it off the launch pad, including the projects that eventually led to the design and launch of Luna 2.The US managed their own hard landing on the Moon in 1962, and it wasn’t until 1966 that the first soft landing—the craft slowing itself before impact, so that some kind of intact device would actually continue to exist and function on the surface of the moon—was accomplished by the Luna 9.The Luna 9 used an ejectable capsule that was protected by airbags, which helped it survive its 34 mph, which is about 54 kmh impact. This successful mission returned the first panoramic photographs from the surface of the moon, which was another notable, historic, incredibly difficult at the time feat.A series of rapid-fire firsts followed these initial visits, including the first-ever crewed flight to the Moon, made by the US Apollo 8 mission in 1968—that one didn’t land, but it did circle the Moon 10 times before returning to Earth, the first successful crewed mission to the surface of the Moon made by the Apollo 11 team in 1969, and by the early 70s humans had made several more moon landings: all of them were American missions, as the US is still the only country to have performed successful crewed missions to the Moon’s surface, but the Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 missions all put people on the lunar surface, and then returned them safely to Earth.The Luna 24, another Soviet mission launched in 1976, was the last big space race era mission to return lunar samples—chunks of moon rock and regolith—to earth, though it was a robotic mission, no humans aboard. And by many measures, the space race actually ended the previous year, in 1975, when Apollo and Soyuz capsules, US and Soviet missions, respectively, docked in orbit, creating the first international space mission, and allowing US astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts to shake hands, symbolically burying the hatchet, at least in terms of that particular, non-earthbound rivalry.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent, successful soft landing on the lunar surface that’s historic in nature, but also contemporarily significant for several other reasons.—Firefly Space Systems was founded in the US in 2014 by a team of entrepreneurs who wanted to compete with then-burgeoning private space companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic by, like these competitors, reducing the cost of getting stuff into low Earth orbit.They were planning to become profitable within four years on the back of the also-burgeoning small satellite industry, which basically means selling space on their rockets, which are capable of carrying multiple small satellites on what’s often called a ‘rideshare’ basis, to companies and agencies that were keen to launch their own orbital assets.These smaller satellites were becoming increasingly popular and doable because the tech required was shrinking and becoming cheaper, and that meant you no longer needed a boggling amount of money to do basic research or to lob a communications satellite into orbit; you could spent a few million dollars instead of tens or hundreds of millions, and buy space on a rocket carrying many small satellites, rather than needing to splurge on a rocket all by yourself, that rocket carrying only your giant, extremely costly and large conventional satellite.This path, it was hoped, would provide them the benefits of economies of scale, allowing them to build and launch more rockets, which in turn would bring the costs of such rockets and launches down, over time.And the general concept was sound—that’s basically what SpaceX has managed to do, with mammoth success, over the past decade completely rewiring how the space launch industry works; their many, reusable rockets and rocket components, and abundant launches, many of which are used to lob their own StarLink in-orbit satellites into space, while also usually carrying smaller satellites provided by clients who pay to go along for the ride, bringing all of these costs down dramatically.So that model is basically what Firefly was aiming for, as well—but the Firefly team, which was made up of folks from Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and other industry entities was sued by Virgin Galactic, which alleged that a former employee who left them to work for Firefly provided Firefly with intellectual property and committed what amounts to espionage, destroying data and hardware before they left.These allegations were confirmed in 2016, and some of Firefly’s most vital customers and investors backed out, leaving the company without enough money to move forward. A second lawsuit from Virgin Orbit against Firefly and some of its people hit that same year, and that left the company insolvent, its assets put up for auction in 2017.Those assets were bought by an investment company called Noosphere Ventures, which relaunched Firefly Space Systems as Firefly Aerospace. They then reworked the designs of their rockets a bit and relocated some of the company’s research assets to Ukraine, where the head of Noosphere Ventures is from.They picked up a few customers in the following years, and they leased a private launch pad in Florida and another in California. In 2021, they were awarded more than $90 million to develop exploration tech for the Artemis Moon program, which was scheduled for 2023 and was meant to help develop the US’s private space industry; NASA was trying out a model that would see them hire private companies to deliver assets for a future moon-based mission, establishing long-term human presence on the moon, over the course of several years, and doing so on a budget by basically not having to build every single aspect of the mission themselves.That same year, the head of Noosphere Ventures was asked by the US Committee on Foreign Investment to sell nearly 50% of his stake in Firefly for national security reasons; he was born in Ukraine, and the Committee was apparently concerned about so much of the company’s infrastructure being located in a country that, even before Russia invaded the following year, was considered to be a precarious spot for security-vital US research and development assets.This is considered to be something of a scandal, as it was implied that this Ukrainian owner was himself under suspicion of maybe being a Russian asset—something that seems to have been all implication and no substance, as he’s since moved back to Ukraine and has gone on to be something of a war hero, providing all sorts of tech and other resources to the anti-invasion effort.But back then, he complied with this request, though not at all happily—and it sounds like that unhappiness was probably justified, though there are still some classified documents on the matter that maybe say otherwise; we don’t know for sure publicly right now.In any event, he and Noosphere sold most of their stake in Firefly to a US company called AE Industrial Partners, and the following year, in 2022 it successfully launched, for the first time, its Alpha rocket, intended to be its core launch option for small satellite, rideshare-style customers.The satellites placed in orbit by that first launch didn’t reach their intended height, so while the rocket made it into orbit, another launch, where the satellites were placed where they were supposed to go, actually happened in 2023, is generally considered to be the first, true successful launch of the Alpha rocket.All of which is interesting because this component of the larger space industry has been heating up; SpaceX has dominated, soaking up most of the oxygen in the room and claiming the lion’s share of available contracts. But there are quite a few private space companies from around the world profitably launching rockets at a rapid cadence, these days. And many of them are using the same general model of inexpensive rideshare rockets carrying smaller satellites into orbit, and the money from those launches then funds their other explorations, ranging from government mission components like rovers, to plans for futuristic space stations that might someday replace the aging International Space Station, to larger rockets and launch craft that might further reduce the cost of launching stuff into space, while also potentially serving as in-orbit or off-planet habitations—as is the case with SpaceX’s massive Starship craft.This is also notable, though, because Firefly launched a lander as part of its Blue Ghost mission, to the Moon on January 15 of 2025. That craft reached the moon, and successfully soft-landed there, on March 2 the same year.This lander was partly funded by that aforementioned 2021 Artemis award by NASA—it ultimately received just over $100 million from the agency to conduct this mission—and it was launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, as the company’s own Alpha rockets don’t yet have the right specs to launch their lander, the Blue Ghost M1; which interestingly shared space in this rocket with another lander produced by a Japanese company called ispace, whose name you might recognize, as ispace managed to get a previous lunar lander, the Hakuto-R 1, to the moon in 2023, but communication was lost with the craft a few seconds before it was scheduled to land. It was confirmed later that year that the lander crashed; though again, even just getting something to the moon is a pretty impressive feat.So this SpaceX rocket, launched in mid-January of 2025, had two competing lunar landers on it, one made by Firefly and one made by ispace. That latter lander is scheduled to arrive on the surface sometime in early May of this year, though that might change, based on all sorts of variables. But the former, Firefly’s Blue Ghost, successfully touched-down, soft-landing on the lunar surface on March 2.There’s another lander from Intuitive Machines—the American company that can claim to be the first to successfully soft-land on the lunar surface, but whose first effort tipped over. Their new lander could arrive as soon as March 6, just days after Blue Ghost, and it’ll be aiming for an area just 100 miles from the moon’s south pole; an area that’s of particular interest because of water ice contained in permanently shadowed areas thereabouts, which could be vital for long-term human occupation of the moon.So things are heating up on the lunar surface these days, but soft-landing something on the moon is still an accomplishment that few nations, much less private companies, have managed.In the past decade alone, India, Russia, and a nonprofit based in Israel have attempted and failed to achieve soft-landings, and those aforementioned Japanese and US companies managed to soft-land on the moon, but their landers tipped over, limiting the amount of research they could conduct once there. China is the only nation to have successfully achieved this feat on their first attempt, and they benefitted from decades of preexisting research and engineering know-how.And it’s not surprising that this is such a rare feat: in addition to the incredible distances involved, the Blue Ghost lander was traveling at around 3,800 mph, which is more than 6,100 kpm just 11 minutes before it landed. It then had to slow itself down, while also adjusting its orientation in order to safely land on an uneven, crater-paved moonscape; it slowed to the pace of a slow walk just before it touched down.Science-wise, this lander is carrying tools that will help it measure the stickiness of regolith on different materials, that will allow for more precise measurements of the distance between earth and the moon, and that will help researchers study solar winds, radiation-tolerant technologies, and the moon’s mantle. It has equipment that allowed it to detect GPS and Galileo signals from earth, which suggests these satellites might be used by craft and rovers on the moon, for navigation, at some point, and it has a drill that will allow it to penetrate the lunar regolith up to nine feet deep, among several other project assets.This has also served as a sort of proof of concept for this lander and mission type, as another Blue Ghost lander is scheduled to launch in 2026, that one aiming for the far side of the moon, with a third currently meant to head out in 2028, destined for a currently under-explored volcanic region.The aggregate goal of these US missions, alongside the research tools they deliver, is to eventually start building-out and supplying the necessary infrastructure for long-term human occupation of the moon, culminating with the construction of a permanently crewed base there.These sorts of ambitions aren’t new, but this approach—funding companies to handle a lot of the legwork, rather than keeping those sorts of efforts in-house, within NASA—is novel, and it arguably recognizes the nature of the moment, which is increasingly defined by cheaper and cheaper, and in most ways better and better offerings by private space companies, while those deployed by NASA are still really solid and impressive, but incredibly slow and expensive to develop and deploy, in comparison.This is also happening at a moment of heightened geopolitical competition in space, and one in which private entities are equipping the nation states that would have traditionally dominates this industry.China’s space agency has enjoyed a flurry of moon-related successes in recent years, and many of these missions have relied at least in part on efforts by private, or pseudo-private, as tends to be the case in China, companies.Business entities from all over the world are also regularly making the satellites and probes and components of landers that make these things work, so solar system exploration and space travel are no longer the exclusive wheelhouses of government agencies—the private sector is becoming a lot more influential in this area, and that’s led to some novel security issues, alongside massive swings in influence and power for the folks running these companies: perhaps most notably SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s increasing sway over governments and even inter-governmental conflict, due in part to his company’s space launch capabilities, and their capacity to beam internet down to conflict zones, earthside, via their StarLink satellite array.So this is an area that’s heating up, both for earthbound and space-faring reasons, and the incentives and peculiarities of the private market are increasingly shaping the type of research and missions being conducted, while also changing the math of what’s possible, how quickly, and maybe even what level of risk is acceptable within a given mission or program.Show Noteshttps://www.cnn.com/science/live-news/moon-landing-blue-ghost-03-02-25/index.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakuto-R_Mission_1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakuto-R_Mission_2https://spacenews.com/ae-industrial-partners-to-acquire-stake-in-firefly-from-noosphere/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_programhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_Alphahttps://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-firefly-aerospace-for-artemis-commercial-moon-delivery-in-2023/https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/22/18234604/firefly-aerospace-cape-canaveral-florida-launch-site-slc-20https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25861-next-generation-of-space-cowboys-get-ready-to-fly/https://apnews.com/article/moon-landings-failures-successes-545ea2f3ffa5a15893054b6f43bdbb98https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/science/blue-ghost-firefly-mission-1-moon-landing.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_Aerospacehttps://www.space.com/the-universe/moon/were-on-the-moon-private-blue-ghost-moon-lander-aces-historic-lunar-landing-for-nasahttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd9208qv1kzohttps://www.reuters.com/technology/space/us-firm-fireflys-blue-ghost-moon-lander-locks-lunar-touchdown-2025-03-02/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/science/intuitive-machines-second-moon-landing-launch-how-to-watch.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_south_polehttps://www.livescience.com/space/the-moon/how-far-away-is-the-moonhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landinghttps://www.space.com/12841-moon-exploration-lunar-mission-timeline.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_24 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

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