The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3579 - The New Economic Nationalism; AI Bubble Already Bursting? w/ Jostein Hauge, Ed Zitron

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

It is an Emmajority Report Thursday on the Majority Report. On today's show: Right Wing broadcaster Charlie Kirk is shot and killed on a university campus in Utah. Simultaneously three teenagers were ...wounded in a shooting in a high school in Colorado. As of writing this the Kirk shooter is still at large and unknown but that has not stopped right-wing media from blaming "Democrats" despite clear data on violence coming from right-wing extremist. Professor at Cambridge University and Political Economist, Jostein Hauge joins the show to discuss his piece "What Does China Want". Checkout his Substack The Global Currents Host of the Better Offline podcast and publisher of the Where's Your Ed At newsletter to discuss why everybody is losing money on Ai. In the Fun Half: Matt Binder and Brandon Sutton Join the show. The MR Crew further discusses the murder of Charlie Kirk and America's culture of violence. Trump looks very unhealthy at a 9/11 ceremony in Arlington, VA all that and more. The Congress switchboard number is (202) 224-3121. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: CURRENT AFFAIRS: for 30% off for a year on any subscription of your choice, go to currentaffairs.org/subscribe and enter the code MAJORITYREPORT at checkout. The offer expires October 31st.   SUNSET LAKE:  Head to SunsetLakeCBD.com and through September 14th, you can save 30% on all Sunset Lake CBD’s Tinctures when you use the coupon code FallTincture Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech Check out Matt’s show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon’s show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza’s music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You are listening to a free version of The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. To support this show and get another 15 minutes of daily program, go to Majority.fm. Please. The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. It is Thursday. September 11th, 2025. My name is Emma Vigland in for Sam Cedar, and this is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA.
Starting point is 00:00:40 On the program today, Yostein Hauga, professor at the University of Cambridge, will be with us to talk about the rise of industrial policy being tied to economic nationalism and how China is kind of doing it better. And later in the show, Ed Zittron will be with us to talk about the AI speculative bubble and how it may finally burst. Also on the show, right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was killed yesterday, shot from long range while speaking at a Utah college. The suspect is still at large, but that has not stopped Republicans from uniformly blaming Democrats. In response, Trump threatens to collectively punish anyone who has called the Republican opposition Nazis. FBI director Cash Patel tweeted that they had the suspect and then had to backtrack two hours later. This was the same day that three former FBI officials sued Patel and Pam Bondi over their firings, alleging political retaliation and incompetence.
Starting point is 00:02:00 No. I mean, it's pretty incompetent to tweet out that you have the suspect. He said subject, too. We'll talk about this. I mean, clown show up there. I saw that subject thing. I was like...
Starting point is 00:02:14 It's suspect, you idiot. Okay. This is what you get when you get a podcaster as the head of the FBI. On the same day as this killing, there was another school shooting in Colorado, injuring two kids and the shooter died as well.
Starting point is 00:02:31 Israel bombs Yemen killing at least 35 people and murders at least five more Palestinians trying to get aid in Gaza as it rains fire down on Gaza City. Qatar says Netanyahu killed any hope of a hostage release by bombing the mediating country, which was Netanyahu's goal, by the way. Inflation rose last month, the biggest monthly increase since January. Trump reportedly begged the South Korean workers whom ICE illegally arrested to please stay and help train U.S. workers like they were supposed to be doing.
Starting point is 00:03:12 And they were like, no, thank you. The House passed the National Defense Authorization Act with some anti-trans add-ons. and Senate Republicans block Schumer's amendment to try to release the Epstein files Senate Republicans beating Chuck Schumer that's day in the life
Starting point is 00:03:36 and lastly Thomas Massey though says he's close to having the 218 signatures needed to force a floor vote on releasing the Epstein files all this and more on today's majority report welcome to the show everybody obviously yesterday towards the end of the show we were getting this breaking news about charlie kirk and we signed off we didn't want to speculate on air but now we
Starting point is 00:04:08 have the news and once again sam is out so you know these major stories forgive me if i stumble still learning on the fly uh in this industry in this field but i'll try to kind of give you my thoughts in the best way I can about yesterday. So basically yesterday, a right-wing activist, podcaster, media personality, founder of the conservative group, Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk was shot dead at an event at Utah Valley University. The video is horrific, gruesome. This shooter fired a single shot from long range, and it's still, still at large. I think like I saw that the shooter
Starting point is 00:04:56 was further away than even the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Last I heard was 200 yards? Yeah. I mean, these are weapons of war. And, you know, I am curious what your position on this is Brian, but, you know, 200 yards is a long shot, but
Starting point is 00:05:12 these guns with scopes are made to do stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah, it's easy to learn, I guess. I was never very good. I want that repeated. I was never very good. I have deer hunted before. As a teenager, as not exactly Davy Crockett, only the practicing every once in a while with my dad. 176 yards, I think, is where I hit a deer from.
Starting point is 00:05:32 And that was probably the upper limit of where I'd shoot from. But that was a moving target. Like, guns do this. And that's the story here. And I want to get to that because anybody that's talking about this story outside of the context of the insane amount of guns and the lethal guns that we have in this. country is not doing a is doing a disservice to the truth behind this story because there is mental illness everywhere, although in other countries they have universal health care to treat mental illness and we don't. But there are not guns like this everywhere in every country for people
Starting point is 00:06:17 to commit these heinous acts. And just to back up for a sec, Charlie was not a person who did good things for the world in his professional career. And I'm not going to police the way that anyone chooses to react to this. Obviously, he has said horrific things about trans people, Palestinians, black people. Among other groups, he, you know, was a part of busing people to January 6th and was a major Trump supporter. But, you know, he got started at TPUSA at 18. and I'm not saying it was a good chance that he would have had some redemption arc
Starting point is 00:06:58 or changed his tune but as people on the left I think everybody deserves that chance and that's why we're against things like capital punishment especially in the civilian context I think it's obviously a very different matter when we're talking about war criminals this is a matter of political speech
Starting point is 00:07:18 but even war criminals you would take them to the hag Right. And it is, right, there should be a process. And it's absolutely insane that we live in a country like this where people have such easy, easy access to the weaponry that gives them the ability to commit political assassinations like this. And Kirk once said, we saw this clip that empathy was a made up new age term at one point. And I disagree. And I want that to kind of come through, I guess, in the coverage or to try to get people to think of it in that way. I do think that the best antidote to this moment right now of fascism, nihilism, casino capitalism, violence, genocide that has consumed
Starting point is 00:08:05 the world, just in terms of what you can, how you orient yourself internally, like we're so desensitized by the internet, separated by screens and we're lacking connection. But it was horrific.
Starting point is 00:08:21 to see Charlie Kirk, a person who we are obviously very familiar with in covering him, have blood pouring out of his neck like that. Kirk was 31. That's how old I am. It's hard not to think of his children and his wife. That was really what I thought of initially. And so outside of that, the policies that the Republican Party and Kirk advocated for are very much why we are in this situation today. Roiders reports that acts of
Starting point is 00:09:00 political violence are double what they were in the first six months of last year, and I am not shocked by that. We also know that violent incidents like this, well, mass shootings in particular, although this was a targeted assassination, but similar weaponry, dramatically, exponentially increase after the Republicans let the assault weapons ban expire in 2004. And nobody should have access
Starting point is 00:09:30 to weapons like this to do this kind of act. It's horrible. And it's people who are pointing out that Charlie Kirk used his platform to say that, I'm sorry, it's just an unfortunate byproduct
Starting point is 00:09:46 that people have to be gun down by gun violence. The exact same time that he was being pronounced dead, kids were 18 kids huddled in one house next to a school in Colorado after two kids were shot during lunchtime. That's just the price we have to pay. That stuff, we don't have video to that because that's not covered for, there's no, like, you know, camera shooting high school lunches for, you know, content later, which is why we have this horrific image of Charlie Kirk dying. But this, that, what happened to Charlie Kirk happens in schools because of the world that is created by people who have no interest
Starting point is 00:10:23 and just sit to say no to any sort of sensible gun control. This does not happen in other countries. Exactly right. And then we'll just turn to the insanity in the White House for a second because as I mentioned in headlines, we have a podcaster running the FBI. He tweeted this out. Like, I mean, the level of incompetence,
Starting point is 00:10:46 he's being sued by former employees for, political retaliatory firings, but the lawsuit paints a picture of just like, this is a total clown show, the likes of which we basically have never seen in the history of the FBI, but also Bondi is in this lawsuit, in the Attorney General's
Starting point is 00:11:03 office. Because their job is just to respond to the whims of Donald Trump, essentially. And this guy got put in place because he was podcasting about Jeffrey Epstein and is now participating in the Epstein cover-up. I mean, his FBI
Starting point is 00:11:19 was found by Wired to have cut out minutes of the footage that they said was unedited when they released of Epsine Cell, which like also the angle of it isn't necessarily clear that it was, but the metadata they were so sloppy
Starting point is 00:11:34 that they left it there for Wired to uncover it and show like they put this in Adobe and cut it out. This is Cash Patel's FBI for you. This is the agency that's supposed to be finding this killer and he's still at large at the time of us recording the show.
Starting point is 00:11:51 So last night at 6.21 p.m. He tweeted, the subject. Okay, I'm, I think he means suspect, but the subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life. Like, he's a drunk? Like, that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody. Thank you to the local and state authorities in Utah
Starting point is 00:12:10 for your partnership with ad FBI. We will provide updates when able. Here's the, here's the update. Less than two hours later. Go to the next tweet. okay here it is the subject in custody
Starting point is 00:12:26 has been released after an interrogation by law enforcement our investigation continues and we will continue to release information and interest of transparency they didn't even have the guy
Starting point is 00:12:35 why are you tweeting that out and they still don't so there's been some information released about what was written on the ammunition to the Wall Street Journal from this FBI I'm not going to run with that yet
Starting point is 00:12:49 because we don't know the identity of the shooter and some of the messages could be written for a variety of different reasons. So we'll hold off on that here. But you know who's not holding off on making political conclusions immediately? You'll be shocked. Donald Trump delivering remarks from the White House,
Starting point is 00:13:09 our president, this is what he has to say about what happened to Charlie Kirk immediately blaming people without any evidence about who actually committed this act. It's a long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder
Starting point is 00:13:28 are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible. For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country
Starting point is 00:13:58 today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement, officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country. From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which killed a husband and father to the attacks on ice agents, to the vicious murder of a health care executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others,
Starting point is 00:14:41 radical and political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives. So he's immediately blaming the left. Two Minnesota lawmakers were assassinated in Brooklyn Park. And Trump said nothing. And based Mike Lee, Mike Lee, the Republican Senator was joking about it, laughing about it. And now he's like clutching his pearls about this. Republican partisans literally are running with, it was a Tim Wall's sleeper cell. They're lunatics.
Starting point is 00:15:09 They're doing with lunatics. And there is no evidence. He basically listed all of the incidents that. I can remember of it being, according to him, this left-wing extremism. Again, we don't have evidence about this here because all of the empirical data, and this is, I know this is the anti-intellectual administration on steroids, but there are actually academic studies about this, and right-wing violence and right-wing extremism is infinitely more responsible for violence.
Starting point is 00:15:41 Here we go. Thank you, Matt. This is the ADL. I know. But this is, so, I mean, this is a 20. But it's not about anti-Semitism. Right. This is 2022 prior to October 7th when they decided, like, anti-Semitism. Well, they'd always felt that way, but this is a little bit more.
Starting point is 00:15:58 Again, it's not on anti-Semitism, so you can trust somewhat what they say, right? Exactly. But domestic extremist-related killings in the U.S. over the past, like from 2013 to 2022, right-wing extremists are responsible for the great majority of extremist-related murders, 75% I mean if it was going by the ADL's bias you would see the domestic Islamist extremism bumped up and it's only
Starting point is 00:16:22 at 20% compared to right-wing extremism and my guess is that's yeah probably for the ADL they cast a wide net on the Islamic part but there's also just countless studies I mean the
Starting point is 00:16:37 this is well well established and I mean Don Jr this like his son was tweeting out my Halloween costume will be a hammer and... Pelosi stuff. Tidy white.
Starting point is 00:16:52 Charlie Kirk said that that guy should be bailed out. Right. The guy who attacked Pelosi or tried to attack Pelosi and hit her elderly husband with a hammer in his home. And did his brain cognitive brain functioning for the rest of his life as far as I've heard? Really? I think he's not recovered. Maybe I'm wrong
Starting point is 00:17:08 about that. I mean, that's horrible. Yeah. And Charlie Kirk was saying bail that guy out. Right. It's all, all horrendous. We are in a very dark moment. And one of the only people that gives us all hope here is Zoran Mamdani. And so this is his, these were his remarks last night upon finding about finding out about Charlie Kirk being killed. And this is the blueprint, folks. So here's Zoran speaking last night. It is a real honor to be in a room so full of love and solidarity.
Starting point is 00:17:48 And I have much of those very feelings and emotions and commitments that I want to share with all of you. But before I begin, I do want to take a moment to address
Starting point is 00:18:03 the horrific political assassination that just occurred today in Utah. Charlie Kirk is dead, yet another victim of gun violence in a nation where what should be a rarity has turned into a plague. It cannot be a question of political agreement or alignment that allows us to mourn.
Starting point is 00:18:31 It must be the shared notion of humanity that binds us all. And that humanity, it reminds us that this news is not just that. of the murder of a prominent political figure, but also the news of a wife who greeds her husband, of a one-year-old and a three-year-old who will grow up with our father, and the fact that there are families
Starting point is 00:18:56 feeling that same anguish right now in Colorado as they wait for their children also shoddered as well to emerge from surgery. It is the same anguish that too many across our city and our nation reckon with its silent. every day as we contend with an epidemic of suffering.
Starting point is 00:19:18 We can and we must do more to challenge a status quo that has allowed this pain to become routine, that has allowed the question of which mass shooting to respond to the news of one that is shared. And it is incumbent upon all of us to repair the tears in our shared civic fabric and to make our nation one that is worthy of its greatest ideals. so that's how you actually are a leader i thought the juxtaposition of that reaction with
Starting point is 00:19:51 trump's kind of says it all right yep what more to add but hopefully we see more as a special politician but this is the kind of leadership we need in the democratic party and in the country we're not there yet but i believe we can be In a moment, we'll be talking about economic nationalism and industrialization with Yostein Haga. But first, a word from some of our sponsors. You know, I'm the kind of person that likes to be incredibly prepared. Like planning for my honeymoon, for example. The Google spreadsheet was a little bit psychotic, but it makes me feel like I have a sense of control.
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Starting point is 00:25:35 we'll be talking to Yosain Haga. We are back and we are joined now by Yostein-Haga, political economist, assistant professor in development studies at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, public. of the Global Currents newsletter, and his latest paper is entitled The New Economic Nationalism, Industrial Policy and National Security in the United States, China, and the European Union. Yostein, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me on the show. It's a pleasure to be here. Of course. So your paper, you co-wrote it with two other people. I don't have their names written down if you want to plug. You can say that now.
Starting point is 00:26:55 Yeah, of course. So the paper, the New Economic Nationalism, was just published in a journal called Geo Forum. And my two co-authors, two of my PhD students, Bruno Hatzager and Alessandro Julian Herman, have also contributed to the paper. It's great. And I've been meaning to kind of send it around to other nerdy people because it explains this moment and this change in, honestly, our economic landscape in a way that I haven't seen articulated yet. So, You look at these kind of three powerful large economies in your analysis, the U.S., China, and the European Union, and how all three are implementing their kind of industrial policies by using national security as kind of the framework for it. But before we get to that, can you define the term economic nationalism for us and what that means, what the new economic nationalism might mean in 2025? Sure. So by economic nationalism, we broadly talk about the drive to develop the national and domestic economy,
Starting point is 00:28:12 the drive to formulate policies that prioritizes securing domestic industries, that prioritizes national development, to some extent at the expense of international cooperation. So it's all about domestic economic, development and prioritizing economic sovereignty and the development of the sovereign state. And why is this a significant shift? We know neoliberalism, that era kind of being ushered in and dominating the global economy for decades. Where do you see that kind of beginning? to turn? So obviously the world economy has been organized around nation states seeking to develop their national economies for decades and centuries. And, you know, we had a period of neoliberalism where this belief in the liberal international order emerged and the idea that free trade and
Starting point is 00:29:23 globalization would lift all boats. But now there's been a bit of a pushback against that. And this is due to many factors. You know, one is, as I said, this liberal international order and this idea of free trade lifting all boats has to some degree crumpled. Rich countries simply are realizing that free trade aren't benefiting them as much as it used to. So they're seeking to some degree to change how things work internationally. The pandemic was also another important driver. it kind of reminded a lot of countries of the dangers of being very dependent on a lot of imports and it drove a lot of countries to reshore production to try and produce more things domestically
Starting point is 00:30:14 and become a bit more strategically autonomous. And another one, and probably the most important one, is the rise of China and the global economy. I don't think it's actually an exaggeration to say that the rise of China is a global economy. global superpower is the most significant economic and political event of this century. And this obviously relates to this, this idea of rich countries not believing in free trade that much. But the rise of China and also China-U.S. competition is very much at the center of this new wave of economic nationalism. Right. And then that's the most, I think, central part of our conversation. And I want to get to that. But first, I would love to stay with like kind
Starting point is 00:30:58 of this, this, uh, the failures of neoliberalism for just a second because your paper talks a lot and you just mentioned how, uh, the, the COVID 19 pandemic was like this accelerant of all of this. I mean, um, in the United States, we had naturally occurring inflation and I think across the world too, um, uh, of course the world did, but it was due to these supply shocks that, um, were caused because of the pandemic and these bottle. necks and these really complicated supply lines causing major issues for for the rest of the world. And it seems like we're still dealing with the implications of how the pandemic affected our political systems. But this one is, it's quite rapid, really, how quickly, you know, that kind of
Starting point is 00:31:53 disruption shifted the conversation. But here in the United States, it's both parties that are, like, having a more protectionist or onshoreing bent to their economic agenda, trumps is completely counterproductive with tariffs, but it still is analyzing the same problem that you're describing or reacting to it. Yes, certainly. What's, you know, it's very fascinating to look at what's happened in the United States in the past 10 years or so. And I would say this turn towards more protectionary.
Starting point is 00:32:28 towards a heavier hand of the state, towards a more active industrial policy, started in the first Trump administration in 2016, 17, 18, with Trump's tariffs on China in particular. It's continued during the Biden administration in somewhat of a different form, more focus on subsidies and maybe more strategic tariffs. Biden also imposed, particularly tariffs on imported energy products from China. And now, of course, we're seeing it with Trump 2.0 with sweeping tariffs everywhere. And a difference here, I would say, in terms of Biden's, in terms of Trump's pursuit of national security and industrial policy, compared to Biden's pursuit, is that there doesn't seem to be as much of a strong rationale behind Trump's tariffs. he even puts tariffs on his allies, supposedly.
Starting point is 00:33:28 You know, what did Canada ever do to the United States? They recognize the Palestinian states, so and fentanyl, I guess. And even, you know, recently India was very, people were shocked that India was slashed with such high tariffs as well. So we're seeing somewhat, you know, of a mayhem in the scene of international trade right now with these sweeping tires and we don't really know where it's going. I've heard some other analysis of like U.S.-China competition being so central to this as like a new Cold War. A lot of people will describe it in that way.
Starting point is 00:34:06 And the usage of national security as like a driver for competition is, I guess, very reminiscent of the Cold War. But kind of your analysis bringing the European Union into this is, it's much more multifaceted. Can you explain why you think that is a more accurate picture of the dynamic here than a little bit more of the retreading Cold War analysis? Yeah. I think there is some, there's some accuracy. And I think there are interesting things to take from this branding of the U.S. China competition as a new Cold War. Obviously, there are some differences here.
Starting point is 00:34:55 First, let's talk about the U.S. and China in that the U.S. and China are highly economically independent of one another. So there is already strong economic relationship here that binds the two countries together in a way that's different from the original Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. So, you know, I don't think when we had the Cold War, there was a lot of fear that this would develop into full-fledged war between the Soviet Union and the United States. And because of the strong economic relationship now between the U.S. and China, I don't think we need to fear that just yet. But obviously, there are tensions between the two superpowers.
Starting point is 00:35:41 Europe is interesting because they're stuck a bit in the middle. They're a close ally of the United States, yet they're also seeking to decouple a little bit from Trump for a while. Now they signed a trade agreement with the U.S., that's very important. So they are still trying to find their feet between China and the U.S. ideologically and also historically, they're more tied to the United States. However, they seem more open to building a relationship with China. At the same time, when they are seeing what's happening between the U.S. and China and, you know, a lot of European countries kind of being the third wheel here in this technological race and competition, they are also trying now to put money into industrial policy and national security. For a long time, the European Union had been a bit more careful and hadn't intervened as much to put in subsidies as heavily, but with, for example, this rearm Europe.
Starting point is 00:36:42 project a huge, a huge bill that essentially aims to put lots of money into military spending in Europe is a sign that also Europe is, in the European Union, is serious about national security and industrial policy. You mentioned that the Europe or the EU is trying to kind of meet in the middle of some of these different tactics. The United States is being. hawkish what a shock um china is really focused on uh building up industrializing and has been for nearly like two decades really and they're way well ahead so they're kind of an example of um less hawkishness and more investment internally and then you kind of have the EU in a bit
Starting point is 00:37:38 of a middle space um just explain all three of those examples and why they're distinct from one another in terms of their approach. So I think it's easiest to start with China because the role of the state has been central to China for many decades. The role of state in economic development has been central in China for many decades.
Starting point is 00:38:00 So you could argue that industrial policy has, you know, in the state-owned enterprises and subsidies and active trade policy and so on has been a part of China strategy for a long time. And in the United States, we started seeing, as I mentioned, the role of the state and industrial policy becoming more central in 2016, focusing on subsidies and trade policy. But we say in the paper, what characterizes the United States is especially this hawkish approach to trade policy. And right now we're really seeing the pinnacle of this. And this is the tariffs we're seeing by Trump are really unprecedented in terms of the aggressiveness and kind of as a strategy.
Starting point is 00:38:42 as a foreign policy tool in negotiations, simply more than kind of an economic planning policy. That's very economic national. It's very much economic nationalism, as you describe. Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way. Go on. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, in the European Union, what we find based on our reading of government documents is that they've tried for years to balance having some autonomy with also being strategically open to both. the United States and China and the rest of the world. But now we are seeing more emphasis on trying to be economically competitive, trying to put more money into the military.
Starting point is 00:39:25 But in the European Union, and obviously there are some caveats here because it's a collection of nation states that have autonomy within the European Union. We need to keep in mind that. But we aren't seeing as clear of a sort of economic nationalist strategy in the European Union as in the United States. And the economic nationalism of the – or sorry, let me backtrack for a second. The China piece that you mentioned there, how much of this is a belated reaction to China with an understanding that China has – gotten so far ahead of the rest of the world as not just being, as it has been derisively
Starting point is 00:40:18 called previously the factory of the world, but as a major economic, multifaceted superpower, basically at this point, that has like an industrial kind of base that isn't just about, you know, exports and making money that way to the rest of the world. But they have developed the capacity internally, to be much more self-reliant than the United States. Yes, yes. And I think this has surprised many people, the pace at which China has developed sort of entire supply chains domestically. Yeah, so, you know, China is still exporting a lot and China still dominates international
Starting point is 00:41:07 trade to a degree. And I think it's, you know, the picture of China's quote-unquote, dominance is nuanced. We see dominance in a lot of manufacturing industries. We see China's dominance in the international trade of goods. At the same time, it's still Chinese workers and firms in U.S. supply chains and not the other way around. So the United States still has structural power in a lot of industries, and they have the companies with the largest market capitalization in the world, et cetera. So the picture is nuanced here. But, Certainly, China is now for sure dominating the manufacture of clean energy devices like electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar panel.
Starting point is 00:41:51 There's no question that they're in the world leader there. They're starting to develop entire domestic supply chains in semiconductors, arguably the world's most technologically advanced industry. and we're also seeing that China's advancing rapidly with artificial intelligence. What's also very interesting about China's rise is that more and more people are saying that U.S. trade policy against China is backfiring because China realized and started realizing
Starting point is 00:42:21 that U.S. actively, you know, a lot of U.S. economic policy right now, very broadly, is about countering China and also preventing China. So they started actively focusing more on trying to develop capabilities across all, across supply chains, both vertically and horizontally within China. So they really have this, have had this drive to develop technological capabilities across all industries for some time. It's proving to be quite successful.
Starting point is 00:42:56 Can you speak about China as a country that is, you know, when we, we, we, talk about here in the United States, like the Chips Act, which was an industrialization bill, basically, was the acronym is about hawkishness with China. And that's how you can get both parties on board. I mean, it's a very bipartisan kind of way that competition with China is viewed here in this country. And you'll hear every Republican refer to China as the Chinese Communist Party over and over again. But in fact, their kind of strategy is one under Xi Jinping of state capitalism. Can you explain that as an economic concept and how China kind of exemplifies it through the structure of their government? Yeah, yeah. So China, you know, China has.
Starting point is 00:44:02 embraced many elements of capitalist markets. They have a huge and thriving private sector. There is wage labor there. They opened up to international trade and international capital flows in the 80s, 90s. And so in that sense, they embrace many aspects of capitalism. But, you know, as you said, U.S. politicians refer to as a communist country, et cetera. And so ideologically, China is different. And it's important to realize while China, you know, has, embraces these capitalist elements, it still has very much roots in socialist and communist ideology. And the political party, the ruling party in China, the Chinese Communist Party, is very proud of this. And in practice, we see this especially when it comes to state control over the economy.
Starting point is 00:44:55 And I think this is a very crucial point, because this is something that separates China, from capitalist Western countries in that the state controls the direction of investment, the direction of credit. In the U.S., for example, you could argue that the private sector controls investment, the financial sector, et cetera. Private banks are very, very important in the U.S. But in China, whereas you have a private sector, the state is really in control over the direction of credit, the direction of investment. They oversee everything. And this is also why you can have
Starting point is 00:45:35 this kind of aggressive, tactical, long-term industrial policy. For example, in clean energy, this would not be possible in a country where, you know, the top 1% of private sector and financial firms control the means of production. So it's, yeah, state capitalism is a fitting label of China and the economy is organized in a way that's quite different in that sense from a lot of Western capitalist countries. And what also struck me, it struck me about this kind of, and you speak about this in the paper, economic nationalism also as like an ideological, ideologically consistent with neo-mercantilism and how there was, that's, that, that is.
Starting point is 00:46:26 It's a viewpoint that also was reflected kind of in some anti-colonial movements like the Pan-African movement, for example. And to see now, like, major economic powerhouse countries adopting some of that framework, it's fascinating because this also isn't going to, you know, exist in a vacuum, this strategy. This will have an impact on developing countries. So I guess as we kind of wrap up here, what will that impact be? And what can we anticipate, you know, for countries that aren't big major powerhouses, obviously like the U.S., China or the EU? Yeah. So this question, the impact of this new economic nationalism on the global economy
Starting point is 00:47:12 and on developing countries is, in my view, the most important aspect of this paper and is one of the most important questions we should discuss. So on the one hand, when we see these major economic, powers implement nationalist policies. This to some degree has detrimental impact on developing countries. Why is this? Well, when you see countries with huge financial muscles or the world generally moving towards more economic nationalism, this obviously benefits those countries that have deeper government offers, more money to spend on industrial policy. Essentially, if it's one big competition, those with more money and those ahead in the game will do, you know,
Starting point is 00:47:56 are the ones who will do the best. And recent research also confirms that, you know, this return of national security and industrial policy is mainly seen in the world's wealthiest countries. But there is a silver lining to this, and there are certain benefits that I think this new world order brings to developing countries, and that revolves around the rise of China.
Starting point is 00:48:21 So China is a country that has emerged from the periphery. It's a huge global power now, But a lot of research suggests that the relationship that China is building with other developing countries is more beneficial for those developing countries. There's obviously a lot of nuance here, and China has different strategies in different countries, but I looked at a really fascinating report published by a Danish NGO called the Alliance of Democracies, and it found that 79% of countries around the world have a more positive view of China than of the United States. And most of these 79% of countries are developing countries. Why do most developing countries in the world like China more than the United States? Well, a lot of it has to do with the way China invests in these countries. They focus a lot on infrastructure investment, manufacturing investment.
Starting point is 00:49:13 And China also respects the sovereignty of these countries more so than historically the United States has done. So, you know, in some ways, the rise of China means stronger South-South cooperation and a larger voice for the global South in the international order to the degree we view China as part of this block of developing countries, which, for example, if we think about China being part of BRICS, it is. Right. And that is, I guess, where I will end with you or a final question here. I mean, we also saw the images coming out of Modi and Putin and Xi kind of embracing.
Starting point is 00:50:02 And it felt like a very clear signal to the United States. Like, you want to be hawks? You want to isolate yourself? Here you go. What was your reaction to that show of kind of unity in the face of Trump? It's, you know, I would say ambivalence, because to some degree, you know, if we see Putin and Modi and Xi coming together, China's diplomatic relationships in the world is not unambiguously positive. I do not support Putin's actions in Ukraine
Starting point is 00:50:48 and to the degree that China, although China tries to have a, you know, tries to not explicitly support Russia, there is implicit support there. And that's not completely unproblematic. But at the same time, I think it's, you know, okay, we could criticize China for supporting. supporting Putin, but at the same time we're seeing, you know, Trump, you know, we have no credibility. We're funding a genocide. We have no credibility on the world stage on this matter. Yeah. That's the thing. You know, to what degree should the United States now lecture
Starting point is 00:51:27 China on this, given that, you know, their funding and directly funding and supporting a genocide in Gaza. So the world is complicated. If we, you know, seeing more international collaboration, between China and India, the two world's most populous countries. And within those countries, a lot of development still needs to occur. That is something that I love to see. And, you know, if India and China can resolve the differences and become closer, and if we can move towards an international order where power is more broadly distributed and where developing countries are represented more,
Starting point is 00:52:07 that I think is unambiguously good. to move towards a more multi-polar world order and one where poorer countries get more power is something that I think is a direction that we should celebrate. I completely agree. Yostein, Haga, political economist, assistant professor in development studies at the University of Cambridge,
Starting point is 00:52:29 publisher of the Global Current newsletter. We'll put a link to your newsletter and your latest paper in the podcast and YouTube descriptions wherever people are listening to or watching this. and at majority.fm. Thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on.
Starting point is 00:52:45 Of course. All right, folks, quick break. And when we come back, we're going to be talking to Ed Zittron of the Better Offline Podcast and the Where's Your Ed at, a newsletter on Substack, about the AI bubble.
Starting point is 00:53:00 And when's it going to burst and how is it going to look? Thank you. We are back, and we are joined now by Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast and publisher of the Where's Your Ed at on Substack? Ed, thanks so much for coming on the show today. On Ghost. It's on Ghost. I'm so sorry. No, it's okay. Everyone makes this mistake. It's okay. It's okay. I mean, our newsletter is on Ghosts too, right? And I never even remember.
Starting point is 00:54:27 But yes. So that's the one that isn't, I guess, funded by a bunch of Silicon Valley. recommending things with swastikas now no yeah that's that's helpful um ed thank you so much for coming on the show of course um so i know you're asked this every single day so i won't i will ask this question but then amend it you're probably asked every day when is this damn ai bubble going to burst so my question to you is not when but how is it going to burst so thanks to oracle we are now set up for a very obvious collapse, which is, so yesterday was announced that Oracle had, well, it was a day before yesterday during their earnings, where they missed on everything. They said they had $317 billion of new customer revenue incoming over the next, from financial year 2027. Turned out that
Starting point is 00:55:20 $300 billion of that is from Open AI, a company that loses billions of dollars a year and has never had more than $16 billion in the bank. So Oracle's stock jumped 40% and a bunch of others jump with it. So just to be clear also, it came out from the Financial Times a couple weeks ago. The Open AI's non-profit conversion is going to be delayed until next year because Microsoft is not really moving on the negotiations. So it's a very complex way of saying that this will end because Open AI will probably die. And no one likes this story. No one wants to talk to me about it too much in the tech media right now because when you really think about it, everything lies on top of Open AI. They are the most, they're the largest compute client in the world. They're $10 billion
Starting point is 00:56:04 of Microsoft's your cloud revenue. They represent pretty much all paying users of generative AI, 20 million paying customers, 5 million business customers. Though I add, 500,000 of those are from Cal State University, 50 million annual contracts, so about $2.50 a user losing a bunch of money, just like Open AI tends to. In any case, Open AI does not have the money to pay this contract. They're meant to start paying Oracle about $30 billion in 2027. These servers are not even in, like the data centers, there's only an eighth of them built. So Oracle neither has the capacity ready to serve the revenue. Open AI doesn't have the money. And the thing that no one seems to want to say is, where the hell are they getting it from? So, and the answer is, there is literally
Starting point is 00:56:53 not enough venture capital to fund this. Venture capital will run out, all of it, like dry powder of available venture capital run out in six quarters at this current rate. And Open AI, to do anything close to what they need to do, will need more than is currently available. Even if they move into private credit, it will not be sufficient. So the answer is, there's a good chance that Open AI just does not convert to a for-profit entity. And if they don't by the end of the year, their current funding round from SoftBank gets cut in half. If they can't convert at all, they will die because they cannot go public and other at that point if open AI cannot go public they turn into a functional Ponzi scheme where the only way for any investor to cash out is for
Starting point is 00:57:36 other investors to enter the system and this is not an accusation of fraud or anything that's just how it will work if they can't convert because they are this weird non-profit hybrid so yeah I think sometime in the next year or two open AI simply falls over and dies of and gets picked to death by carrion birds. And once that happens, everything else falls apart because open AI represents pretty much all the revenue. They make more than everyone else combined. There's probably $40 billion of active revenue in generative AI, which is nothing. And Open AI represents, I think, like a third or half of that. They represent all of the compute. They're most of Microsoft's compute. They're going to be most of Oracle's revenue, if any of that was true. Open AI disappears.
Starting point is 00:58:18 There's not that much business here. It's a Fagasy. It's all. all made up. It's genuinely disgusting. Yes. And that is, but, but all of this Fugazi, uh, kind of, uh, run around stuff is just there to create more investment. I mean, that's what's been agonizing about this whole, uh, discussion is, is that the so much of the AI, uh, discussion, even the, uh, you know, the, the guys going on podcasts to talk about how it's going to take over the world and be like robots. That's how great our product is. It could take over the world. anyone want to invest um it's all been so much billions and billions of of money that's gone
Starting point is 00:58:59 into this and basically wasted um because it could disappear as you say overnight because they cannot create right now a model that is profitable well it's not just the lack of profitability it's not just the fact that these companies in general don't make much money i mean perplexity, AI startup, search engine type company that has raised $300 million in the last two months, two separate rounds. They spent over 140% of their revenue last year just on compute. These companies do not function in the way that regular startups do on an operational level. The whole point of cloud software, the whole reason that tech has its valuations, is that these are asset-like businesses where the biggest costs are salespeople and customer
Starting point is 00:59:45 service. Generally, infrastructure has not been a problem. It is insane, but tech has now taken on the burden of classical industrialization without any path out. And what's crazy is, I did an article called why everybody's losing money on AI last week. It's not clear that even the people providing compute, as in the people building the data centers with the GPUs in them, are making any profit. And if they are, it's going to take years. But on top of all of this, this crap don't work. It doesn't do that much. It's not that useful. These people, going on podcasts and saying, oh, it's going to do this. Oh, China, not to insult the previous guest, but China's building powerful AI.
Starting point is 01:00:22 Are they? Are we talking about generative AI? Because when it comes to large language models, so the underlying tech behind like chat GPT and Claude and all that, that's not powerful. It's not doing much. And indeed, a ton of other AI stuff that isn't making that much money, but it's far more interesting, is unrelated to this. But they want to conflate it because the actual products that are underneath, well,
Starting point is 01:00:45 that are built on top of large language models are kind of crap. They're good for Casey Newton of platformer. His best he's got was to say, oh, yeah, we should take this seriously. AGI is coming because it turns out that chat GPT can do most kinds of homework. That's not why we send children to school. We don't send people to university to do homework so that the homework's complete. It's not like there's a goblin we feed the homework to. We do it so that people learn.
Starting point is 01:01:13 It's just it's fantastical. ridiculous and ultimately dangerous. And can we just even back up to how we got to this point here? Because so much of what you're talking about, the way that the model is completely not profitable, was a lot of how tech and some of these, like, gig economy companies were spoken about, and I know it's different. And I want you to explain how that's different because I know, like, is Uber even making money? Like, I feel like they're still, I'm not sure.
Starting point is 01:01:45 or maybe it was like last year or two years they started making money. But like a lot of these tech companies started operating at a loss. And some have gotten over the hump, especially because, you know, they're now some of the most highly traded companies on the stock market and things like that. But this, you lay out how it's different in your piece, if you don't mind explaining to our audience. So it's very simple. So Uber, well, Amazon Web Services is a comparison point that people make. They shouldn't. Over the course of 10 years, Amazon Web Services cost about 10% of the global investment
Starting point is 01:02:19 from AI in the last two. So Amazon Web Services is nothing to do with it. It was also cash flow positive within a couple years. Uber, I think they burned about $30 billion between 2019 and 2022. Now, most of that was between R&D and sales and marketing. They just burned a bunch of money to get people out and then were taking a loss on drivers too. They cranked up the prices, horrible labor abusers. But the classic mistake here, and this is a lot of is actually, I'm not saying you're doing this, but a lot of people posing that Uber was just like this are doing so in bad faith. Because the thing that nobody wants to admit is that Microsoft, Amazon, and Google paid for Open AI and Anthropics infrastructure. So people can say,
Starting point is 01:02:59 oh, Open AI is raised 60 billion or what have you. Anthropics done the same. Oh, and they, look, Uber burned a lot of money too. No, the actual total amount, when you really look at how much Amazon and Google handle Anthropic, Microsoft handles Open AI. They've put between them hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure just for these companies. So it's not anything like Uber. The timeline is smaller. And on top of it, Uber's costs were not running the cars.
Starting point is 01:03:28 This would be if Uber's cars were run using giraffe blood. And you had to blow them up at the end of every ride and build a new car by hand. And I sound like I'm being facetious, but it really, the economics of this are completely and utterly insane. And they are getting worse because people have been saying, oh, the cost of inference is coming down. It's actually going up. There's a story by Christopher Mims about this in the Wall Street Journal is everywhere now. So this crap is getting more expensive to do the same things.
Starting point is 01:04:00 It's still doing the same crap. And what they like to do is say, well, look, it's going up on the benchmarks. The benchmarks are made to make the models look better. because you can't test these things on actual things that people do because they cannot do them. Well, we have some data showing that at least these larger firms here are starting to agree with you because there are all these promises of how AI can help basically replace a workforce, but this is an article in Fortune magazine. AI adoption rates are declining and kind of have been for these larger firms.
Starting point is 01:04:38 who are beginning to realize this since basically the middle point of this year. Explain why that's happening, Ed. Well, it's quite simple. It doesn't do enough. The enterprise will, and there was a paper that came out of MIT Nanda as well that said 95% of generative AI integrations have 0% in return on investment. Now, within that, there was this statement that's very valuable, which is that adoption is high in the enterprise, but disruption is low.
Starting point is 01:05:05 these products cannot learn because these do generative AI has no brain they do not think they have they do not have human thinking they are just probabilistic models and as a result they are limited in what they can do to pretty much the same things they summarize they can generate text they can generate images they can sometimes successfully generate a PowerPoint but even then you can't do it every time and at some point i imagine enterprises rolling out these big integrations spending all this money, are going, okay, does this do anything we actually need? And at some point, why would they continue? You'll note that we're three years into this. And we still don't have any really tangible examples of anyone doing anything interesting or large scale disruptive. I mean,
Starting point is 01:05:53 within a few years of the iPhone, we had tens of millions of smartphones. You had entire organizations adopting smartphones across the board. You had bring your own device companies growing, literally just to provision iPhones and similar devices for corporate clients. You had growth within the enterprise that you could map out year by year. We have a line trending down. That's not good. And people really would love to say, oh, well, the dot-com boom, the line went down too. There was no line go down when it came to the growth of cloud compute.
Starting point is 01:06:26 And Uber, completely different consumer company, not relevant. But nevertheless, their burn was still significantly lower over time. And they were also a necessary product. I think the horrifying labor abusers, but still, the product made sense. But in generative AI, the returns are not there on a financial level, but the actual product still does functionally the same thing it did two years ago. Since GPT4, there really hasn't been a significant thing that's changed. Even reasoning models, it's just kind of putting a hat on a hat at this point. you speak a little bit about in one of your pieces on your site invidia and how this bubble could burst if their growth begins to slow
Starting point is 01:07:10 you're that you point out there's this thing called like the magnificent seven uh basically these big seven companies that make up so much of the u.s stock markets value and you posit that invidia is the of these seven at this point. Can you explain why that's the case and what these weaknesses are? So the funny thing is, is that invidia is the only company I think that's making any real profit from this. They are doing so well to the point that the market has a fundamentally unhealthy relationship with them. Invidia's revenue, 88% of it comes from data center revenue, which is selling these GPUs and the associated bits with them. Of that revenue, around 42% of it comes from six other companies. Really, mostly four.
Starting point is 01:07:58 Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta. In all four of those cases, they're making bugger all revenue. But in this case, the market has come to expect Nvidia to grow anything from 70 to 150% every single year, year over year, every quarter, they must grow that much. And then you look at it right now, and they slowed to a ridiculously high, but not high enough, 55%, I think it was, year over year. It's unsustainable. There is no way that NVIDIA is just going to be able to go, okay, we'll sell $70 billion, then $100 billion, $150 billion worth of GPUs. And if you're worried, you should be more worried because that's actually what needs to happen to keep this rally going, because nobody's making any real money.
Starting point is 01:08:43 Yeah, and I think just for people that don't know, can you explain Nvidia's place in the market and why they have it cornered just even like, you know, spelling it out very simply just because like what GPUs are and what their product is? And even if you don't mind explaining, like, Taiwan's role in also all of this. So Taiwan's role will be with TSM, which is basically the chip manufacturer. or DeJure, they do everything. TSM does way more than GPUs. They do more than this. InVIDIA makes a GPU, a graphics processing unit,
Starting point is 01:09:22 but the ones that they sell a lot of are these AI GPUs. And they're not kind of like the ones you put in a computer. They're much bigger. You serve, I think you put 72 of them in a rack. You need these massive cooling rigs and servers to make them run. And they run something called CUDA.
Starting point is 01:09:38 CUDA. Now, this language is exclusive to Nvidia GPUs and is functionally the only way to run generative AI. There are other examples, but no one else can scale like NVIDIA, and indeed, no one can really run Kuda. So you either have to make a large language model specifically for another language and another GPU, which is incredibly hard to do.
Starting point is 01:09:59 China's trying to do this right now. Or you can just buy from NVIDIA, which is what everyone's doing. The problem is these GPUs are insanely expensive. We're talking 50,000 to 70,000 apiece, And you need to buy 72 of them each rack and you need to buy a lot of racks. And so you're in this situation where there's this massive expenditure, this insane amount of money you're spending.
Starting point is 01:10:23 And then you install them and they immediately start losing your money. And based on semi-analysis's analysis, it probably takes, they cost about $2 an hour to run, which may not seem too bad when you're making, I don't know, $3 an hour. But that's if you're at 80% or high utilization, as in like it's being used for 80% at the time. Most of them are not, because the demand is not there for generative AI services, and where it is available, well, it's with Microsoft and OpenAI, and all of that business has been taken. So I believe that most people that are actually installing these GPUs at scale are losing tons of money, and their customers, when they get these generative AI services,
Starting point is 01:11:04 are going, why do I care? And I believe most of Open AI's actual existence within the market is not legitimate. It's based on a three-year-long marketing campaign by a tech and business media that's lost the plot and a society that, and markets that needed a new growth pick. They needed a new thing to point out and say this is the future. And big tech was behind it too, right? Like, I mean, they're deeply invested. And then another thing that you write in your piece about what could happen if the bubble burst is these big tech companies abandoning some of this AI stuff. Can you speak a little bit about that and why that could be on the horizon? So all of these companies, these big tech companies, have been spending
Starting point is 01:11:46 Microsoft spending $80 billion of capital expenditures this year, Amazon $105 billion of capital expenditures. The market quite like this when the market had the brains of babies and went, ooh, AI, I've heard AI mentioned a few times. I like that. Number go up. Here's the thing. Now that the market is saying, wait, is there any actual return on this investment? They're starting to say, well, is your revenue going to keep growing? Because this whole time, and this is where the business video really screwed up, every time these companies saw revenue growth, the media would say, and that proves that AI is working. Now, what's missing from all of these earnings is any actual explanation of how much money they're making from AI. Because they're not.
Starting point is 01:12:29 They're not making any. Well, that's not true. Microsoft's making $13 billion, and they stopped reporting their AI revenue in January for some reason, projected to make $13 billion this year. 10 billion dollars of that is from OpenAI's compute, which is sold at cost on an already money losing thing. Meta expecting to make $3 billion. An analyst predicts the Amazon will make $5 billion from AI. This is not a lot of money for companies that make over $100 billion a year. Microsoft has you made, I think, $70-something billion in the last year and all that. This is jump change. And as you have shown, adoption is going down. The only reason we're seeing this spike right now is, honestly, it's not quite Enron,
Starting point is 01:13:15 but it smells a little bit about it. The Oracle is saying, yeah, we got $300 billion of revenue coming, May. It's going to be amazing. Yeah, it's from one company that loses billions of dollars of year that doesn't have any money right now and needs to convert to a for-profit. But yes, everyone go nuts. It's going to be great. I just hate it because in the end, retail investors are regular people that are investing
Starting point is 01:13:35 with this who have been lied to, who believe people in the media, who believe senior officials that say AI is so powerful that don't do their own research that are not actually being given the full story are going to invest heavily in invidia heavily in oracle and get their asses kicked when this falls apart and invidia like i just in in terms of its lack of sustainability um i mean there there are going to be new technologies and new different like GPUs that might be more efficient like maybe but the thing even if whether there is or there Invidio will survive this. None of these big tech companies are dying, which is why, by the way, there will be no government bailout. There's nothing to bail out. None of these companies are going to die.
Starting point is 01:14:19 Oracle, however, is actually in systemic problems because they are taking on $38 billion of debt, I think, just to complete one part of the compute to serve Open AI, a company that doesn't have the money. Invidia generally, because of that coding language, Cuda, and it's a coding language and series of libraries and such to run compute on GPUs that that they've they started working on that over a decade ago everyone has been trying to work that out and crack that nut I don't think anyone's going to do it but I don't think it really matters because ultimately this boom has come from building capacity or a revolution that never even started arriving and I think everyone the sources of information that people rely on everyone's been let down well
Starting point is 01:15:09 if people read your newsletter on Ghost where's your Ed at you'll not be kept in the dark so I really appreciate your work on this Ed obviously we'll put a link to your newsletter where's your Ed at in the description below wherever people are listening to or watching this Ed Zittron thanks so much for your time today I really appreciate it thanks for having me of course
Starting point is 01:15:35 with that folks will end the free part of our program and head into the fun-ish part of our program where we will read your IMs, maybe take some calls. We'll see how our call machine is even working if it is at all. We've been having some issues with it recently. Might be a good day to have issues with it. Yeah, we'll see. Oh, it's a damn McDonald's, the damn McDonald's Blizzard machine ain't working.
Starting point is 01:16:03 Yeah. A McFlorer machine. I'm calling in. Oh, hello. Hello, Brandon. Hello. This show relies on your support. Join the majority report.com, please. If you would like to support our work.
Starting point is 01:16:20 Brandon, what's happening over on the discourse? Well, in honor of 9-11, which happens every year, we are doing two days, one for each tower, on 9-11 conspiracy theories. So today we went over the official story And just a few of like the more grounded in reality stuff You know the Israeli involvement the Saudi involvement The Bush family's involvement with the Saudi royal family Building 7 Control demolition
Starting point is 01:16:55 You don't do a sort of you don't do a sort of third half day for building seven You just do the two days for the two towers Do you believe in building seven? Do you believe it was Are you, are you, are you, are you, are you, are you, are you going to be in building? Builds 70s. No, yeah. So, tomorrow we'll be doing some of like the remote controlled planes, uh, no planes, uh, no planes, no buildings, um, uh, Pentagon hit by missile.
Starting point is 01:17:27 Manhattan, actually doesn't exist. No, I mean, you say that, you know, space lasers, dustification, the dustification of the Twin Towers, uh, Howard Lutnik's involvement predictive programming the ways in which the Twin Towers being well I guess we can't say what for sure happened to them the way in which it was predicted
Starting point is 01:17:47 or like planted in the media up until the event so yeah we're going to have honestly you might actually need it as Nick Mullen would say brand number one of a kind I'm going to check that out later I need a little bit of a laugh all right check out the discourse for all that fun stuff
Starting point is 01:18:03 Matt what's happening on Left Reckoning Yeah, Left Rickening on a Tuesday night, we talked about Zoran responding to, like, being compared to Trump by CNN. Weird stuff going on CNN. Also, Nilo Trabrizi talking about women's liberation movements in Iran. And, yeah, we also talked about James Tilariko and how we both sort of prefer him over Allred, but also are pretty wary of the Miriam Adelson gambling money that he takes. and we'd probably welcome Beto to jump into the race. I'm staying in the race. Hello, Matt Binder.
Starting point is 01:18:43 Hello. How are you? I just got Niam saying that you were on Navarra media just now. I was. Damn, I can't do anything without people reporting on what I'm doing. Yeah, tattling on me. I'm cheating on the majority port on Thursdays. No, no, that's good.
Starting point is 01:19:01 You gave your American perspective to our friends over there in the UK. What's happening in your neck of the woods other than that? Yeah, I did a stream, a very long, late-night stream that went to like two or three in the morning on my channel at YouTube.com slash Matt Binder last night. I had a lot of people calling in. Check that out if you're interested. The Navarra Media hit I just did a couple of minutes ago. And tonight at the same YouTube channel left this mafia. Be sure to tune in to all that.
Starting point is 01:19:33 All right. I just want to get this note in the main show. Senior law enforcement officials has the ATF report claiming ammo was, ammo with the rifle was engraved with certain slogans to do with the left, has not been verified conflicts with other evidence summaries and, quote, might turn out to have been misread or misinterpreted. Pretty crazy. Insane.
Starting point is 01:19:55 The Wall Street Journal has been on a hot streak and getting a lot of scoops for the Trump administration. that that is crazy that they publish that and Rush to publish that thing about these anti-trans or these pro-trans and pro-antifa slogans and we didn't even say what it said at the beginning
Starting point is 01:20:15 of the show because I knew that this is that why would I believe this? It's clearly the FBI led by fucking Cash Patel leaking this stuff. I'm not saying that that wasn't the case but we just don't know until we know who the suspect is and the freaking FBI head is a lunatic
Starting point is 01:20:30 who's not on top of it and is more worried about getting ahead of the narrative to blame trans people. This stuff stays out there, by the way. People should really understand. Of course. A big media company, even the Wall Street Journal with their leanings, still their large legacy media company, to any of them putting this stuff out there is insanely dangerous. I see time and time again shootings from years ago. People still cite things that were reported in the first hour.
Starting point is 01:21:00 that were debunked within minutes that were completely false that these people still believe and refuse to not believe because they already saw it and it's already ingrained in their brains. This stuff, no matter what this ends up being about, whatever falsehoods out there are going to remain. I still see people sharing the pictures of the two individuals who were detained and released, no matter how many times the FBI has said,
Starting point is 01:21:25 these people are not suspects. People are still sharing their pictures. I mean, Cash Patel called it a subject. He didn't even say suspect. This is amateur hours and he's putting it mildly. We actually do need like functioning federal law enforcement
Starting point is 01:21:43 to find someone like this. Crazy to say, but... ProPublica has the profile on this guy here. This is Thomas Fugate the 3rd. A 22-year-old Trump intern who was pointed to leave counterterrorism and threat prevention at DHS. he gutted the department fire and 75% of the staff
Starting point is 01:22:00 look at him I mean we have his picture up here like an SNL character he dot literally he gutted he also doesn't look 22 I mean but anyway he gutted the department firing 75% of the staff suggesting domestic terror and domestic born shooters
Starting point is 01:22:15 weren't the problem I heard somebody say dismiss it as gang vounds too weren't the problem and that the department needs to quote focus on illegals the department coordinates cross agency tips helps power online monitoring programs for proactively catching things like mass shootings before they happen. But, you know, they're giving no staff.
Starting point is 01:22:31 And look, it's the illegals. We need to go after. We need to have everyone on the home depots to see who wants to do some shingling and not who's, like, maybe going to assassinate somebody with a deer hunting rifle or whatever gun. I don't know. They found their rifle. I think, yeah. They said it was like a long-range rifle.
Starting point is 01:22:49 They weren't specific. But we will talk about this, obviously, this major story more in the fun half, whatever. You know, the not-free half. We've been doing the fun half for two years through Gaza. We're not going to stop calling at that now. Yes. Well said, Matt. All right. See you on the other side. I mean, and not dying.
Starting point is 01:23:10 See you in the fun half. You are in for it. All right, folks. 646, 25, 7, 39, 20. See you in the fun half. Oh, no. Are you ready? Who sent us this?
Starting point is 01:23:31 Alfa males are back, back, back, back, back, boy, and the alpha males are back, back, back, back. Just as delicious as you could imagine. The alpha males are back, back, back, back, back, boys, back, and the alpha males are back, back, back, back. Just want to degrade the white man. Alfa males are back, back. I take all of them. me to my phone. Alpha males are back, back, back, back, back.
Starting point is 01:24:01 Snobflex has what? The alpha males are back, back, back, back. You are a madman. And the alpha males are back, back. Oh no, Sam Cedar, what a, whoa, what a fucking nightmare. Yeah, or a couple of them, just put them in rotation. DJ Denner. Well, the problem with those is they're like 45 seconds long, so I don't know if they're
Starting point is 01:24:22 enough for the brakes to be there. That's fucking nonsense. white people doing drugs that look worse than normal white people and all white people look disgusting and the alpha males are psyched fuck them fuck them uh oh blah a blah ager soffleck says what what what what what what what what what what what what what what what what what what what Club says what a hell of a bank Okay, I'm making stupid money.
Starting point is 01:24:59 Hell of a hell of a lot of bank. A hell of a lot of bank. All lives matter. Have you tried doing an impression on a college campus? I think that there's no reason why reasonable people across the divide can't all agree with this. Scyke? And the alpha males are bad, back, back. back, back, back, back.
Starting point is 01:25:28 And the Africans are black, black, black, black, black, African. And the alpha males are black, black, black, black, black, black. And the Africans are back, back, back, black, black. When you see Donald Trump out there, doesn't a little party you think that America deserves to be taken over by jihadists? Keep it at 100. Can't knock the hustle. Come out.
Starting point is 01:25:50 Fuck them. Fuck them. Things I do for the bigger game plan. By the way, it's my birthday. Happy birthday to me, Jew boy. I have a thought experiment for you. And the alpha males are back, back. Africa's are black, black.
Starting point is 01:26:07 Alpha males are black, black. Black, Africans are back, back. Come on. Come on. Someone needs to pay the price for plasticity around here. I am a total... Possible. Thank you.

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