1/ I cannot put into words the heartbreak I feel when I look at what’s unfolding in our country.

We're approaching a precipice. If we don’t find a way to reach some sort of working consensus the situation is only going to become more intractable and quite frankly more dangerous.

2/ The behavior of risk assets in the face of all this uncertainty is perhaps the most alarming data point in a sea of bad news.

There simply is no discernible relationship between value metrics and price. The signaling mechanism sending information between the two is broken.

3/ The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would have described what we are living through today as "hyperreality," a condition in which what is real and what is fiction or narrative are so entangled that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.

4/ The danger with this is that we disassociate from the world that nurtures and sustains us to such a degree that we sleepwalk our way into tragedy, expecting someone else to "solve the problem."

This presumes that someone else is "in charge."

5/ But I think what is becoming clear is that no one is in charge. There isn’t a hidden intelligence at work steering humanity across the chasm.

To the extent that the system has taken on a life of its own, it is steering itself and us towards the abyss and not out of it.

6/ If we want a different outcome, we will have to make sacrifices. This means elevating our country's interests above our own.

We’ve spent the last 4 years tearing each other apart and what has it done for us? It’s left us vulnerable.

This is a luxury we can no longer afford.

7/ I’ve done nearly 200 @HiddenForcesPod episodes with people from all different backgrounds and walks of life in order to get my arms around the problems & opportunities we face as a society.

None of this means anything if we don’t recognize the power we have to change things.

8/ This means working constructively with those who put forward a positive vision for the country and not feeding into the partisan hysteria or exploiting the nihilism in our marketplace by promoting schemes for profiteering or personal gain.

9/ We should all keep this in mind going forward.

Societies much older than ours have gone down similar paths. It did not end well for them.

It would be foolish to think that we are somehow different.