Convergence

I used to give talks on politics in emerging markets — Turkey, democracy, economic transformation. My predictions aged like milk. I was optimistic.

Too optimistic. I assumed good ideas would eventually win.

That voters, when given the facts, would choose reason over rage.

Spoiler: they didn’t.

These days, I speak about AI and the future of work.

Why?

Because that’s where the tectonic plates are shifting. And because I’ve learned this: the biggest threat to the future isn’t just automation.

The alienation that accompanies it!

In 2013, I wrote a book with the wildly ambitious goal of reforming the Turkish Left — not “updating,” not “rebranding,” but rebuilding from the ground up.

I also ran for parliament, thinking that ideas, data, and a vision for the future might stand a chance against entrenched populism.

I was wrong.

Now I run an AI startup — Enquire AI — that fuses machine intelligence with human insight.

I’ve seen this from both politics and tech: data is cheap. Wisdom is rare.

Three macro trends are colliding and will determine our future:

Richard Reeves laid it out in Of Boys and Men: modern economies and education systems are abandoning young men.

Lower academic performance. Higher unemployment. Less connection. Less purpose.

They feel invisible. So they get loud.

It’s not a coincidence that Trump’s rallies sound like a marching band for lonely young men. The chants, the rage, the conspiracies — it’s a soundtrack of masculine despair. Populism is the political translation of male alienation.

Erdoğan, Putin, Trump — they didn’t invent this energy. They harnessed it. They wrapped grievance in nationalism and resentment in religious identity. They turned disempowered men into foot soldiers for strongman politics.

Young men didn’t find authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism found them.

Add artificial intelligence to this emotional stew, and the result isn’t innovation — it’s upheaval.

AI is eliminating mediocre labor from the economy. It doesn't kill all jobs. It kills the predictable ones.

The linear ones. The ones that used to provide a decent life for average people.

Enquire lets companies blend algorithmic speed with expert judgment.

What we’re seeing is simple: AI can do the first 90%. But humans still own the final 10%, the “last mile.”

But not all humans. Only the best. The ones who combine technical depth with strategic judgment, and — this matters more than you'd think — empathy.

There's a creeping sense for everyone else that the economy is running away without them.

Authoritarians didn’t just erode trust in institutions. They declared war on truth itself.

They don’t fear expertise — they need to kill it.

Expertise is the last line of defense against power that is unmoored from facts.

They go after scientists, judges, professors, central bankers — not because they’re wrong, but because they’re inconvenient.

Populism has become epistemic sabotage.

Trump called scientists “frauds,” journalists “enemies of the people,” and universities such as Harvard “ woke factories.”

Erdoğan jailed not only his opponents, but also economists and journalists.

What happened?

Rankings plummeted. Applications fell. The message was received: think less, obey more.

What I’ve come to realize — and what economists like Daron Acemoğlu have long warned — is that prosperity isn’t about GDP, or even technology. It’s about institutions.

When institutions rot, everything else eventually follows. Courts. Universities. Central banks.

Public trust.

Democracies used to be held together by institutions: courts, schools, a free press.

Now, those institutions are being hollowed out and turned into weapons.

And as populists hollow out these institutions and replace expertise with loyalty, the state becomes less of a government and more of a brand campaign.

This is not mismanagement. It’s a strategy.

The result? People don’t just disagree on what should be done — they no longer agree on what is.

We are past “fake news.” We are in “fake reality.”

Here’s the thing: these aren’t separate crises.

They’re merging.

We’ve got a generation of disaffected men searching for meaning, an economic transformation gutting the middle class, and populist regimes bulldozing every institution that once filtered truth from noise.

On their own, each is destabilizing. Together, they’re a Molotov cocktail.

And now, throw in geopolitics on fire.

War in Ukraine. Chaos and desperation in the Middle East. Global supply chains are strained.

Authoritarian backsliding.

All while the world’s economic center of gravity tilts east and the climate clock ticks louder.

In a moment that demands competence, nuance, and institutional strength — we’ve got clowns.

We used to argue about tax policy.

Now we argue about whether vaccines contain microchips. The quality of political leadership has collapsed.

Influencers in suits have replaced statesmen. Career diplomats have been replaced by online provocateurs.

You want to mitigate cascading risks across climate, tech, demographics, and war?

But today’s leadership class is too often illiterate in complexity.

They don’t understand systems, so they break them.

They don’t understand consequences, so they chase clicks. And because the bar is so low, they keep getting elected.

The result: a dangerous gap between our problems' complexity and our institutions' competence.

We are flying blind into turbulence, with the cockpit manned by reality TV contestants.

And yet, I’m not giving up. We should not give up.

I believe we can fight back — not just with facts, but with knowledge networks that reward clarity over clout.

Want to thrive in this world? Learn two things deeply. Learn five things decently. And sample a dozen others. Because the ability to connect dots — across disciplines, across cultures, across code and capital — is the real power skill of the 21st century.

We are entering a world where AI gives everyone answers. The winners will be those who ask better questions and interpret the answers wisely.

I gave up politics when I realized the system didn’t want people like me in it.

But I didn’t stop believing in ideas. I just found a new way to fight for them.

In these newsletters, I’ll use that same instinct — to question, reframe, and connect the dots — to make sense of the chaos.

My goal is to offer a clear, systems-level view of both micro and macro risks — the ones markets misread, institutions mishandle, and media often reduce to noise.

These are not isolated disruptions.

They’re signals of deeper, structural change.

Artificial intelligence, democratic decay, geopolitical crises, male dislocation, leadership erosion — none of these are random.

They’re converging forces reshaping humankind.

In this newsletter, I’ll analyze these signals, track their intersection, and unpack what they mean for decision-makers, investors, and citizens alike.

My focus will be on the last mile—that narrow but decisive space where global forces converge with local realities and where citizens' trajectories are not merely observed but determined.