The Everything Machine and the Trillion-Dollar Bet

What if the story we're being told about AI's inevitability is hiding something underneath? In this episode, Jessica and Kimberly sit down with George Kamide, anthropologist, community builder, and co-host of Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks, to look past the headlines about the AI bubble and ask who actually has skin in the game.

This is an episode about following the money, but it is also about following the questions. What is the outcome we actually want from this technology? And what happens to all of us when the people building it cannot answer that?

Topics Covered

• Why the dot-com bubble is the wrong analogy for AI infrastructure
• How special purpose vehicles and obfuscatory financing hide AI debt
• The Magnificent Seven and concentration risk in the S&P 500
• Taiwan, TSMC, and the helium supply chain most people have never heard of
• The "everything machine" promise and why it cannot pay for itself
• Why an AI crash could starve the narrowly-focused applications that actually work
• The labor reorganization problem and why generalists may win
• What chatbot tutors get wrong about teaching
• Mythos, the open source ecosystem, and concentration of access to powerful tools
• Why we keep analogizing ourselves to whatever technology we just built

Referenced in This Episode

• George Kamide and Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks
• Ed Zitron's reporting on AI infrastructure at Where's Your Ed At, including The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble and AI Bubble 2027
• Paul Kedrosky's analysis at Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy, which compares the AI buildout to past infrastructure booms
• David Shapiro's earlier appearance on the show, Beyond Work: Post-Labor Economics
• DeepLeaf, the Moroccan agritech company using AI to help small farmers detect crop disease
• The MIT Antibiotics-AI Project that used deep learning to discover a new structural class of antibiotics against MRSA
• Khan Academy's Khanmigo and the recent reckoning with the limits of LLM-based tutoring
• Raffi Krikorian, CTO of Mozilla, and his New York Times op-ed It's the End of the Internet as We Know It on Mythos and open source access
• Michael Pollan's new book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

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