Episode

Iran War is the First Missile War (crossover with Seeking Truth From Facts podcast) – #110

Podcast
Manifold
Published
Apr 23, 2026
Duration seconds
2967
Processing state
not_requested
Canonical source
https://share.transistor.fm/s/83a4ae47
Audio
https://media.transistor.fm/83a4ae47/d4926f43.mp3
JSON
/v1/public/podcasts/manifold-4829537/episodes/iran-war-is-the-first-missile-war-crossover-with-seeking-truth-from-facts-podcast-110
Markdown
/podcast/manifold-4829537/iran-war-is-the-first-missile-war-crossover-with-seeking-truth-from-facts-podcast-110.md

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Summary

Steve and Alf discuss the Iran War, emphasizing what it reveals about modern missile and anti-missile technology, drones, and the implications for a US-China conflict in the Western Pacific. Links: https://seekingtruthfromfacts.substack.com/ Chapter Markers: (00:00) - Missile War Reality Check (01:49) - How the War Started (04:46) - Iran Outperforms Expectations (06:22) - Why Missile Defense Fails (14:25) - Ceasefire and Hormuz Brinkmanship (19:52) - Nukes and the JCPOA Fallout (33:44) - US Politics and Israel Lobby Aftershocks – Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to [email protected] or Steve on X @hsu_steve. Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring! https://mechanize.work/b/hsu Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example: Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors $500K salary Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t…