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Let's Know Things

Let's Know Things

De: Colin Wright
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 A calm, non-shouty, non-polemical, weekly news analysis podcast for folks of all stripes and leanings who want to know more about what's happening in the world around them. Hosted by analytic journalist Colin Wright since 2016.

letsknowthings.substack.comColin Wright Política e Governo
Episódios
  • 2026 Iran War

    2026 Iran War
    Mar 10 2026
    This week we talk about Khamenei, Trump, and Netanyahu.We also discuss Venezuela, Cuba, and cartels.Recommended Book: Plagues upon the Earth by Kyle HarperTranscriptAli Hosseini Khamenei was an opposition politician in the lead-up to the Iranian Revolution that, in 1979, resulted in the overthrow of the Shah—the country’s generally Western government-approved royal leader—and installed the Islamic Republic, an extremely conservative Shia government that took the reins of Iran following the Shah’s toppling.Khamenei was Iran’s third president, post-Shah, and he was president during the Iran-Iraq War from 1981-1989, during which the Supreme Leader of Iran, the head of the country, Ruhollah Khomeini sought the overthrow of then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Khomeini died the same year the war ended, 1989, and Khamenei was elected to the role of Supreme Leader by the country’s Assembly of Experts, which is responsible for determining such roles.The new Supreme Leader Khamenei was reportedly initially concerned that he wasn’t suitable for the role, as his predecessor was a Grand Ayatollah of the faith, while he was just a mid-rank cleric, but the constitution of Iran was amended so that higher religious office was no longer required in a Supreme Leader, and in short order Khamenei moved to expound upon Iran’s non-military nuclear program, to expand the use and reach of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in-country and throughout the region, and he doubled-down on supporting regional proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza, incorporating them into the so-called Axis of Resistance that stands against Western interests in the region—the specifics of which have varied over the decades, but which currently includes the aforementioned Hezbollah and Houthis, alongside smaller groups in neighboring countries, like Shiite militias in Bahrain, and forces that operate in other regional spheres of influence, like North Korea, Venezuela, and at times, portions of the Syrian government.Khamenei also reinforced the Iranian government’s power over pretty much every aspect of state function, disempowering political opponents, cracking down on anyone who doesn’t toe a very conservative extremist line—women showing their hair in public, for instance, have been black-bagged and sometimes killed while in custody—and thoroughly entangled the functions of state with the Iranian military, consolidating essentially all power under his office, Supreme Leader, while violently cracking down on anyone who opposed his doing whatever he pleased, as was the case with a wave of late-2025, early 2026 protests across the country, during which Iranian government forces massacred civilians, killing somewhere between 3,000 and 35,000 people, depending on whose numbers you believe.What I’d like to talk about today is a new war with Iran, kicked off by attacks on the country from Israel and the United States that led with the killing of Khamenei and a bunch of his higher-up officers, how this conflict is spreading across the region and concerns about that spreading, and what might happen next.—On February 28, 2026, the US and Israel launched a wave of joint air attacks against Iran, hitting mostly military and government sites across the country. One of the targets was Khamenei’s compound, and his presence there, above-ground, which was unusual for him, as he spent most of his time deep underground in difficult-to-hit bunkers, alongside a bunch of government and military higher-ups, may have been the rationale for launching all of these attacks on that day, as the attackers were able to kill him and five other top-level Iranian leaders, who he was meeting with, at the same time.This wave of attacks followed the largest military buildup of US forces in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq back in 2003, and while military and government targets were prioritized, that initial wave also demolished a lot of civilian structures, including schools, hospitals, and the Grand Bazaar in Tehran, leading to a whole lot of civilian casualties and fatalities, as well.In response, Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, and at US bases throughout the region—these bases located in otherwise uninvolved countries, including Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Iranian missiles and drones also hit non-military targets, and in some cases maybe accidentally hit civilian infrastructure, in Azerbaijan, and Oman, alongside a British military base on the island of Cyprus.The Iranian president apologized in early March for his country’s lashing out at pretty much everyone, saying that there were miscommunications within the Iranian military, and that Iran wouldn’t hit anyone else, including countries with US bases, so long as US attacks didn’t originate from those bases.Despite that apology, though, Iranian missiles and drones continued ...
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    17 minutos
  • Killer Robots and Mass Surveillance

    Killer Robots and Mass Surveillance
    Mar 3 2026
    This week we talk about Anthropic, the Department of Defense, and OpenAI.We also discuss red lines, contracts, and lethal autonomous systems.Recommended Book: Empire of AI by Karen HaoTranscriptLethal autonomous weapons, often called lethal autonomous systems, autonomous weapons systems, or just ‘killer robots,’ are military hardware that can operate independent of human control, searching for and engaging with targets based on their programming and thus not needing a human being to point it at things or pull the trigger.The specific nature and capabilities of these devices vary substantially from context to content, and even between scholars writing on the subject, but in general these are systems—be they aerial drones, heavy gun emplacements, some kind of mobile rocket launcher, or a human- or dog-shaped robot—that are capable of carrying out tasks and achieving goals without needing constant attention from a human operator.That’s a stark contrast with drones that require either a human controlled or what’s called a human-in-the-loop in order to make decisions. Some drones and other robots and weapons require full hands-on control, with a human steering them, pointing their weapons, and pulling the trigger, while others are semi-autonomous in that they can be told to patrol a given area and look for specific things, but then they reach out to a human-in-the-loop to make final decisions about whatever they want to do, including and especially weapon-related things; a human has to be the one to drop the bomb or fire the gun in most cases, today.Fully autonomous weapon systems, without a human in the loop, are far less common at this point, in part because it’s difficult to create a system so capable that it doesn’t require human intervention at times, but also because it’s truly dangerous to create such a device.Modern artificial intelligence systems are incredibly powerful, but they still make mistakes, and just as an LLM-based chatbot might muddle its words or add extra fingers to a made-up person in an image it generates, or a step further, might fabricate research referenced in a paper it produces, an AI-controlled weapon system might see targets where there are no targets, or might flag a friendly, someone on its side, or a peaceful, noncombatant human, as a target. And if there’s no human-in-the-loop to check the AI’s understanding and correct it, that could mean a lot of non-targets being treated like targets, their lives ended by killer robots that gun them down or launch a missile at their home.On a larger scale, AI systems controlling arrays of weapons, or even entire militaries, becoming strategic commanders, could wipe out all human life by sparking a nuclear war.A recent study conducted at King’s College London found that in simulated crises, across 21 scenarios, AI systems which thought they had control of nation-state-scale militaries opted for nuclear signaling, escalation, and tactical nuclear weapon use 95% of the time, never once across all simulations choosing to use one of the eight de-escalatory options that were made available to them.All of which suggests to the researchers behind this study that the norm, approaching the level of taboo, associated with nuclear weapons use globally since WWII, among humans at least, may not have carried over to these AI systems, and full-blown nuclear conflict may thus become more likely under AI-driven military conditions.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent confrontation between one AI company—Anthropic—and its client, the US Department of Defense, and the seeming implications of both this conflict, and what happened as a result.—In late-2024, the US Department of Defense—which by the way is still the official title, despite the President calling it the Department of War, since only Congress can change its name—the US DoD partnered with Anthropic to get a version of its Claude LLM-based AI model that could be used by the Pentagon.Anthropic worked with Palantir, which is a data-aggregation and surveillance company, basically, run by Peter Thiel and very favored by this administration, and Amazon Web Services, to make that Claude-for-the-US-military relationship happen, those interconnections allowing this version of the model to be used for classified missions.Anthropic received a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense in mid-2025, as did a slew of other US-based AI companies, including Google, xAI, and OpenAI. But while the Pentagon has been funding a bunch of US-based AI companies for this utility, only Claude was reportedly used during the early 2026 raid on Venezuela, during which now-former Venezuelan President Maduro was taken by US forces.Word on the street is that Claude is the only model that the Pentagon has found truly useful for these sorts of operations, though publicly they’re saying that investments in all of these models have borne fruit, at least to some degree.So ...
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    16 minutos
  • Tariff Ruling

    Tariff Ruling
    Feb 24 2026
    This week we talk about Trump’s tariffs, the Supreme Court, and negotiating leverage.We also discuss trade wars, Greenland, and the IEEPA.Recommended Book: Smoke and Ashes by Amitav GhoshTranscriptI’ve spoken on this show before about tariffs and about US President Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs as an underpinning of his trade policy. Last October, back in 2025 I did an episode on tariff leverage and why the concept of an ongoing trade war is so appealing to Trump—it basically gives him a large whammy on anyone he enters negotiations with, because the US market is massive and everyone wants access to it, and tariffs allow him to bring the hammer down on anyone he doesn’t like, or who doesn’t kowtow in what he deems to be an appropriate manner.So he can slap a large tariff on steel or pharmaceuticals or cars from whichever country he likes just before he enters negotiations with that country, and then those negotiations open with him in an advantageous spot: they have to give him things just to get those tariffs to go away—they have to negotiate just to get things back to square one.That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. What we talked about a bit back in October is TACO theory, TACO standing for Trump Always Chickens Out—the idea is that other world leaders had gotten wise to Trump’s strategy, which hasn’t changed since his first administration, and he has mostly been a doubling-down on that one, primary approach, to the point that they can step into these negotiations, come up with something to give him that allows him to claim that he’s won, to make it look like he negotiated well, and then they get things back down to a more reasonable level; maybe not square one, but not anything world-ending, and not anything they weren’t prepared and happy to give up.In some cases, though, instead of kowtowing in this way so that Trump can claim a victory, whether or not a victory was actually tallied, some countries and industries and the businesses that make up those industries have simply packed up their ball and gone home.China has long served as a counterbalance to the US in terms of being a desirable market and a hugely influential player across basically every aspect of geopolitics and the global economy, and this oppositional, antagonistic approach to trade has made the US less appealing as a trade partner, and China more appealing in comparison.So some of these entities have negotiated to a level where they could still ship their stuff to the US and US citizens would still be willing to pay what amounts to an extra tax on all these goods, because that’s how tariffs work, that fee is paid by the consumers, not by the businesses or the origin countries, but others have given up and redirected their goods to other places. And while that’s a big lift sometimes, the persistence of this aggression and antagonism has made it a worthwhile investment for many of these entities, because the US has become so unpredictable and unreliable that it’s just not worth the headache anymore.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent Supreme Court decision related to Trump’s tariffs, and what looks likely to happen next, in the wake of that ruling.—Ever since Trump stepped back into office for his second term, in January of 2025, he has aggressively instilled new and ever-growing tariffs on basically everyone, but on some of the US’s most important trade partners, like Mexico and Canada, in particular.These tariffs have varied and compounded, and they’ve applied to strategic goods that many US presidents have tried to hobble in various ways, favoring US-made versions of steel and microchips, for instance, so that local makers of these things have an advantage over their foreign-made alternatives, or have a more balanced shot against alternatives made in parts of the world where labor is cheaper and standards are different.But this new wave of tariffs were broad based, hitting everyone to some degree, and that pain was often taken away, at least a little, after leaders kowtowed, at times even giving him literal gold-plated gifts in order to curry favor, and/or funneling money into his family’s private companies and other interests, allowing him to use these tariffs as leverage for personal gain, not just national advantage, in other cases giving him what at least looked outwardly to be a negotiating win.Things spiraled pretty quickly by mid-2025, when China pushed back against these tariffs, adding their own reciprocal tariffs on US goods, and at one point extra duties on Chinese imports coming into the US hit 145%.Shortly thereafter, though, and here we see that TACO acronym proving true, once again, Trump agreed to slash these tariffs for 90 days, and around the same time, in May of 2025, a federal appeals court temporarily reinstated some of Trump’s largest-scale tariffs after a lower court ruled that they couldn’t persist.The remainder of 2025 was a story of Trump ...
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    13 minutos
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