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This week we talk about Electronic Arts, 3DO, and the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund.We also discuss Jared Kushner, leveraged buyouts, and loot boxes.Recommended Book: Bandwidth by Dan CarusoTranscriptElectronic Arts, often shorthanded as EA, was founded in 1982 in California by a former Apple employee named Trip Hawkins, who also went on to found the ill-fated 3DO company, which made video game hardware, and the somewhat more prolific, but also ultimately ill-fated casual game developer Digital Chocolate.EA, though, has been an absolutely astounding success. It’s business model was predicated on the premise of selling video games directly to retailers, rather than going through intermediaries. This allowed them to gain more market share than their competitors right off the bat, and it helped them glean higher margins than their competitors from each direct sale, too.EA also established an early reputation for treating its developers really well. They were the first gaming company to feature their developers in advertising and to give them platforms, promoting them as video game artists, basically, and it shared the profits netted from those direct sales with these develops—which in turn meant all the best developers really wanted to work for EA, which led to a beneficial cycle where they created better and better, and more and more financially successful games.In the late-80s, they started deviating from this model somewhat, scooping up a collection of successful independent game development studios and deviating, at times, from the creative lead’s vision when releasing their games. They also refocused a fair bit of their resources on franchises, like the immensely successful, as it turned out, Madden NFL series, and they branched out into producing games for the console market, including the still-new Nintendo Entertainment System, in 1990.That same year, EA went public on the NASDAQ, the company got new leadership when Hawkins decided to refocus on his far less successful 3DO hardware startup, and in an interesting twist, the arrival of the Sony Playstation in North America caused EA to drop support for 3DO hardware in the mid-90s so it could refocus on Playstation games, which were a lot more lucrative.By the mid-90s, EA had an astonishingly large and successful software library, including franchises like the aforementioned Madden games and the FIFA soccer games, but also celebrity-tied games like Shaq Fu, and military shooters like Jungle and Urban Strike.By the early-2000s, EA was making exclusive licensing deals with the NFL and ESPN, in order to stave off newfound sports game competitors, and it was the only video game company to consistently make a profit, most others experiencing feast and famine cycles, with periodic wins, but a whole lot of losses they had to cover with the profits from those wins. EA, in contrast, had a reliable stable of profit-sources, and it thus had a whole lot of leverage in terms of attracting and retaining talent, but also getting big names and brands on board, for collaborative projects.What I’d like to talk about today is what happened to EA during and following the 2008 economic crisis, and how and why it recently became an acquisition target for Saudi Arabia.—In 2008, when the global economy was collapsing, EA suffered a bad holiday sales season and fired 1,100 employees and closed 12 of their facilities early the following year. Later in 2009, the company announced the firing of another 1,500 employees, which was about 17% of their total workforce at the time, and in 2010 they acquired a gaming company that focused on mobile games, which were becoming increasingly popular, now that many people had touch-capable smartphones, which brought hot new franchises like Angry Birds under their brand umbrella.On the strength of that acquisition and all those downsizings, in early 2011, EA announced that it hit $3.8 billion in revenue in the financial year for the first time, and in early 2012, it announced it surpassed $1 billion in digital revenue during the previous year, which was a huge figure that early in the digital media landscape. It used some of those profits to scoop up another mobile-first gaming company, adding properties like Plants vs Zombies and Peggle to their library.EA completed another mass-firing in 2013, dismissing 10% of their employees under what they called a reorganization, around the same time they announced an exclusive license with Disney that would allow them to develop Star Wars games.Their stock value boomed in the following years, as a result of those cost-savings measures, and those new relationships, and emboldened by record-high stock valuations, in the mid-20-teens, the company started releasing big-name games, like Star Wars Battlefront 2, with random-content loot boxes and other sorts of microtransactions.This did not go over well with players, who decried these in-game purchasing options as ‘pay to win’ mechanics, as players could pay more money to get better characters and equipment, and a lot of the content, even after paying for the expensive games, was still locked behind paywalls, requiring more payments to unlock that content. A bunch of gaming journalists cried foul on this shift as the game careened toward its full release, as did a whole lot of early players, and Disney complained, too, so by the time it hit shelves, the game’s loot system was substantially changed, but that whole controversy spooked investors, and led to an 8.5% stock value drop in just a single month, knocking $3.1 billion from the company’s valuation. As a result of that controversy, EA also became the face for a larger legal and legislative debate about in-game purchases and how it’s kinda sorta like gambling, from that point forward.Soon after, EA experienced a series of bad quarters, including a huge drop of 13.3% to its valuation when a major entry in one of their larger franchises, Battlefield V, was released late, and received very mixed reviews when it was released, which led to a million fewer sold copies than anticipated. The game was also lagging in terms of gameplay behind smaller, nimbler competitors, including then-burgeoning Fortnite.The company saw an overall boost with the surprise success of Apex Legends, and the COVID-19 pandemic boosted sales dramatically for a while, since everyone was staying home, which allowed EA to gobble up a few more competing companies with successful franchises, and they knocked out a few more successful Star Wars games, as well.In early 2021, Saudi Arabia’s public investment funds bought 7.4 million shares of EA for about $1.1 billion, which flew under the radar for most gamers, but that’ll be important in a moment.Later that year, the company experienced a massive hack, a lot of its data, including the source code for games, stolen and sold on the dark web. EA bought some more competitors, but word on the street in 2022 was the the higher ups at EA were quietly shopping the company around, themselves looking to be acquired by a larger entity, on the scale of Apple or Disney.In early 2023, the company announced more mass-layoffs and launched another internal reorganization. It gutted several of its most popular gaming sub-brands, including BioWare, it cancelled an upcoming Star Wars game, and it announced that it would be shifting away from licensing agreements and refocusing on EA-owned IP.The pattern of layoffs leading to better financial fortunes didn’t pay off this time, though. In early 2025, EA divulged that it expected to underperform in the coming year, several of its big-name titles not doing as well as expected; the company cast blame on the market, but players and journalists pointed at the company’s gutting of its big-name studios, and the firing of many of its veteran developers to explain the reduced sales.EA had another mass-firing in April of this year, and followed by another in May, which paralleled an announcement that they would no longer be moving forward with a big, planned Black Panther game.In late September of 2025, EA announced that it had reached a deal, worth $55 billion, to go private, no longer selling shares on the stock market, with the financial assistance of a group of investors, which included Affinity Partners, which is led by Jared Kushner, US President Trump’s son-in-law, Silver Lake, which is a US-based private equity firm that helps make these sorts of big sales happen, and the aforementioned Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund.This deal isn’t done yet, it still needs to get regulatory approval and a successful vote by stockholders, but it seems likely to go through, since the US regulatory environment is pretty lax at the moment, and because Kushner is involved, it’s unlikely President Trump will take a personal disliking to it.But the big story here seems to be that Saudi Arabia is buying up not just a video game company, but one of the biggest and most successful video gaming companies in the world, which, although it’s lost a lot of fan-credibility over the years, still owns some massively influential intellectual property and has just a stunning number of relationships and connections throughout the media world, alongside its huge valuation.If the sale does go through, and we should know for sure by sometime around June 2026, it would be the largest-ever leveraged buyout, which means the purchase was completed by using borrowed money that was borrowed against the asset being purchased; so those investors have taken out debt against EA itself, which is an increasingly common means of buying a large asset on the cheap, but it also typically burdens that asset with a simply astounding amount of debt which must then be recouped, often by selling off undervalued assets.When this happens to a newspaper, for instance, the buyer will often sell off the paper’s real estate and fire all their employees, to make money and pay off that debt, and in this case, there’s a chance that debt will be paid by throwing up a bunch of new paywalls and really leaning into those in-game transactions that nobody really liked, including politicians, back in the day, but which in this current regulatory environment would probably be allowed, and they would probably make some serious bank off of it initially, before players started getting wise and moving on to other games released by less predatory companies.The really interesting facet of this story, though, is the question of why Saudi Arabia wants a video game company.And to understand that, it’s important to understand that, first, the country’s Public Investment Fund is meant to help its economy shift away from purely extractive resources, like oil, and it has thus invested in all sorts of things, including luxury beach resorts, minority stakes in financial service companies like Citigroup, stakes in companies like Disney and Boeing and Meta, and increasingly, investments in companies run by allies of President Trump, like the aforementioned Affinity Partners, which was formed by Jared Kushner.So this is an economic play, but also a political play, almost certainly, by the Saudis, to get in good with the people who are in good with the US government.It’s also been alleged that this might be an attempt by the Saudis to engage in what’s being called game-washing, which is similar to greenwashing, but instead of trying to make a company seem green and sustainable by doing kinda sorta green things, but only as a veneer to cover up the opposite, in this case it means using sports and video games and the like to increase a nation’s reputation with humanistic seeming things, despite, well, the truth being much more complicated.Just as when the Fund participated in buying a Premier League football, a soccer team, back in 2021, then, alongside their concomitant establishment of LIV Gold, a golf league meant to compete with the PGA, this investment in EA, and other investments it’s made in video game companies like Capcom and Nexon, might be part of a larger effort to diversify the nation’s brand, not just its economics. It’s human rights record is abysmal, and it’s possible they’re trying to cover that up, make people forget about it, by creating more connections between Saudi Arabia and more positive things, like sports and games and the like.There are additional concerns about this purchase of EA, too, by the way, because Saudi Arabia’s cultural values are very anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-liberal, democratic values. So there are fears that we might see less representation and fewer what we might call western values portrayed in the games released by these studios, as a result of this ownership.The folks running EA have said their core values will remain unchanged by the buyout, but it’s expected, bare-minimum, that this will lead to another several restructurings and mass-layoffs throughout the company in the coming years, to help recoup all that debt, at the end of which even the people making those promises might be long gone.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Investment_Fundhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/business/dealbook/electronic-arts-buyout-jared-kushner.htmlhttps://www.wsj.com/business/deals/ea-private-deal-buyout-video-game-maker-808aefechttps://www.ft.com/content/61cef75e-ceba-43ee-80e3-040756c6154f?accessToken=zwAGQAMTiJKIkc9hzvdezrpD7tOA4wQHVsYVTw.MEUCIHND3WOT4rS4frIMIOoeXHQeil_Ma1yGrwOqUD2m306DAiEAtA_QLvpyObai9zoo_9GZSljJuJyTKxJgFHpQDcCcVsE&sharetype=gift&token=03dd6ca5-c34f-4925-8a3d-a89f4058ee80https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/ea-silver-lake-deal-jared-kushner-c145cd55?st=eZghQHhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Arts This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about Article 4, big sticks, and spheres of influence.We also discuss Moldova, super powers, and new fronts.Recommended Book: More Everything Forever by Adam BeckerTranscriptThe North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, was originally formed in 1949 in the wake of World War 2 and at the beginning of the Cold War.At that moment, the world was beginning to orient toward what we might think of as the modern global order, which at the time was predicated on having two superpowers—the US and the Soviet Union—and the world being carved up into their respective spheres of influence.NATO was formed as the military component of that protection effort, as the Soviets (and other powers who had occupied that land in the past) had a history of turning their neighbors into client states, because their territory provides little in the way of natural borders. Their inclination, then, was to either invade or overthrow neighboring governments so they could function as buffers between the Soviet Union and its potential enemies.The theory behind NATO is collective security: if anyone attacks one of the member nations, the others will come to their aid. Article 5 of the NATO treaty says that an attack against one member is considered an attack against all members, and while this theoretically would be applied against any would-be attacker, it was 100% created so that the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies knew that if they attacked, for instance, Norway, the other NATO nations—including, importantly, the United States, which again, was one of just two superpowers in the world at that point, all the other powers, like the UK and France having been devastated by WWII—would join in their defense.NATO, today, is quite a bit bigger than it was originally: it started out with just 12 countries in Europe and North America, and as of 2025, there are 32, alongside a handful of nations that are hoping to join, and are at various points along the way to possibly someday becoming member states.What I’d like to talk about today are recent provocations by the Soviet Union’s successor state, Russia, against NATO, and what these provocations might portend for the future of the region.—In early 2014, Russia invaded—in a somewhat deniable way, initially funding local rabble-rousers and using unmarked soldiers and weapons—the eastern portion of Ukraine, and then annexed an important Black Sea region called Crimea. Then in early 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, massing hundreds of thousands of military assets on their shared border before plunging toward Ukraine’s capitol and other vital strategic areas.Against the odds, as Ukraine is small and poor compared to Russia, and has a far smaller military, as well, Ukrainians managed to hold off the Russian assault, and today, about 3.5 years later, Ukraine continues to hold Russia off, though Russian forces have been making incremental gains in the eastern portion of the country over the past year, and Russian President Putin seems convinced he can hold the Donbas region, in particular, even if peace is eventually declared.At the moment, though, peace seems unlikely, as Russian forces continue to grind against increasingly sophisticated and automated Ukrainian defenses, the invading force, in turn, bolstered by North Korean ammunition and troops. Ukraine’s exhausted soldiery is periodically and irregularly bulwarked by resources from regional and far-flung allies, helping them stay in the game, and they’re fleshing out their locally grown defense industry, which has specialized in asymmetric weaponry like drones and rockets, but Russia still has the advantage by pretty much any metric we might use to gauge such things.Over the past three weeks, concerns that this conflict might spill over into the rest of Europe have been heightened by Russian provocations along the eastern edge of the NATO alliance.Russia flew drones into Poland and Romania, fighter jets into Estonia, and aggressively flew fighters over a Germany Navy frigate in the Baltic Sea. Article 4 of the NATO treaty was invoked, which is the lead-up invocation to an eventual invocation of Article 5, which would be a full-fledged defense, by the bloc, against someone who attacked a NATO member.And that’s on top of Russia’s persistent and ongoing efforts to influence politics in Moldova, which held an election over the weekend that could serve as a foot in the door for Russian influence campaigns and Russia-stoked coups within the EU, or could become one more hardened border against such aggressions, depending on how the election pans out. The final results aren’t in as of the day I’m recording this episode, but there are fears that if the pro-Russian parties win, they’ll turn the country—which is located on Ukraine’s borders, opposite Russia—into another Russian puppet state, similar to Belarus, but if the pro-Russian parties don’t do well, they’ll try to launch a coup, because Russian disinformation in the country has been so thorough, and has indicated, in essence, if they lose, the process was rigged.All of which is occurring at a moment in which NATO’s most powerful and spendy member, by far, the US, is near-universally pulling out of international activities, the second Trump administration proving even more antagonistic toward allies than the first one, and even more overt in its disdain for alliances like NATO, as well. It’s probably worth noting here, too, that part of why things are so hectic in Moldova is that the US government has stopped pressuring social networks to tamp down on overt misinformation and propaganda from Russia-aligned groups, and that’s led to significant fog of war for this most recent election.Considering the US’s recent unreliability, and in some cases complete absence regarding NATO and similar alliances and pacts, it’s perhaps prudent that NATO member states have recently agreed to up their individual spending on defense, all of these states meeting or exceeding their pre-2025-summit goal of 2% of GDP, that target increasing to 5% by 2035.This is notable in part because it’s something Trump demanded, and that demand seems to have worked and probably been a good idea, but this is also notable because of what it represents: a cessation of leadership by the US in this alliance.The US has long been the big stick wielded by its European allies, and this administration basically said, hey, you need to make your own big sticks, you may not have access to our weapons and support anymore. And while it will still take a while to both get their funding up to snuff and to spend those funds appropriately, outfitting their defenses and shoring up their numbers, this would seem to be a step in that direction—though there’s simmering concern that it might be too little, too late.That concern is mostly held by Russia-watchers who have noted a big pivot by Russia’s leadership, and in the Russian economy.Over the past 3.5 years since it invaded Ukraine, that invasion taking a lot longer than they thought it would, Russia has shifted into a total war stance, its entire economy becoming reliant on its continued invasion of Ukraine.Should that invasion end or ebb, or should it continue to fail to give the Russian government enough successes, so it can brag about how well it’s doing to its citizenry and oligarchs, it would probably need another target—another front in the war that it can open to justify the continued churning-out of weapons and soldiers, and the continued spending of a huge chunk of its GDP toward the military. Lacking that churn, it’s economy would be in even worse straits than it’s in, today, and lacking that cause, it’s possible support for the government could collapse.It’s also been posited that it could be a disaster Putin’s regime if too many Russian veterans, wounded and traumatized from their time on the front lines in Ukraine, were to arrive back in Russia all at once. That’s the sort of situation that could lead to an uprising against the government, or bare minimum a lot of turmoil that they don’t want to deal with. Having another front, another battle to send them to, would solve that problem; it would be an excuse to keep them fighting external enemies, rather than looking for internal ones.Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, recently said that NATO and the EU have declared a “real war” against Russia by participating in the conflict; by providing arms and financial support for Ukraine.This is, of course, a silly thing to say, though it is the kind of statement an aggressor makes when they want to make themselves sound like the victim, and want to justify moving on to victimize someone else. You attacked us for no reason! We are thus completely within our rights to defend ourselves by attacking you; we are in the right here, you’re the bad guys.This could be just saber-rattling, and it usually is. Lavrov says things like this all the time, and it’s almost always state-sanctioned bluster. The drone and jet flyovers, likewise, could be meant to send a signal to the EU and NATO: back off, this is not your fight, but if you continue supporting Ukraine, we’ll make it your fight, and we think we can beat you.It’s also possible, though, that these actions are meant to test NATO defenses at a moment in which the US is largely absent from the region, China and Russia have never been tighter, including in supporting each other’s regional goals and militaries, and in which Russia seemingly has many reasons, mostly internal, to expand the scope of the conflict.Show Noteshttps://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/pistorius-russian-jet-flew-over-142629311.html?guccounter=1https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/world/europe/russian-fighter-jets-estonia-nato.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/business/russia-disinformation-trump.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/world/europe/poland-drones-russia-nato.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelude_to_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukrainehttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ygjv0r2myohttps://thehill.com/policy/international/5522862-lavrov-nato-eu-russia/https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/27/europe/putin-hybrid-war-europe-risks-intlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/27/world/europe/russia-europe-poland-drones-moldova-election.htmlhttps://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-poland-drones-sanctions-rafale-429ff46431a916feff629f26a5d0c0dahttps://www.reuters.com/world/europe/denmark-has-no-plans-invoke-natos-article-4-foreign-minister-says-2025-09-26/https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2025/09/27/More-drones-spotted-Denmark/4031758983759/https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-poland-drones-defense-kyiv-ec284922b946737b98a28f179ac0c5a0https://apnews.com/article/poland-airspace-drones-russia-airport-closed-cf7236040d8c7858104a29122aa1bd57https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-poland-drones-fa2d5d8981454499fa611a1468a5de8bhttps://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-poland-drones-1232774279039f9e5c5b78bd58686cb9https://apnews.com/article/british-intelligence-mi6-russia-war-443df0c37ff2254fcc33d5425e3beaa6https://apnews.com/article/nato-article-4-explainer-russia-poland-estonia-26415920dfb8458725bda517337adb12https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/nato-article-4-russia/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/world/europe/moldova-election-russia-eu.htmlhttps://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_49187.htmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATOhttps://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_52044.htm This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about corruption, influencers, and pro-monarchy protests.We also discuss Nepalese modern history, Gen Z, and kings.Recommended Book: Superagency by Reid Hoffman and Greg BeatoTranscriptThe Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, usually referred to as just Nepal, is a country located in the Himalayas that’s bordered to the northeast by China, and is otherwise surrounded by India, including in the east, where there’s a narrow sliver of India separating Nepal from Bhutan and Bangladesh.So Nepal is mostly mountainous, it’s landlocked, and it’s right in between two burgeoning regional powers who are also increasingly, in many ways, global powers. Its capital is Kathmandu, and there are a little over 31 million people in the country, as of 2024—more than 80% of them Hindu, and the country’s landmass spans about 57,000 square miles or 147.5 square kilometers, which is little smaller than the US state of Illinois, and almost exactly the same size as Bangladesh.Modern Nepal came about beginning in the mid-20th century, when the then-ruling Rana autocracy was overthrown in the wake of neighboring India’s independence movement, and a parliamentary democracy replaced it. But there was still a king, and he didn’t like sharing power with the rest of the government, so he did away with the democracy component of the government in 1960, making himself the absolute monarch and banning all political activities, which also necessitated jailing politicians.The country was modernized during this period, in the sense of building out infrastructure and such, but it was pulled backwards in many ways, as there wasn’t much in the way of individual liberties for civilians, and everything was heavily censored by the king and his people. In 1990, a multiparty movement called the People’s Movement forced the king, this one ascended to the throne in 1972, to adopt a constitution and allow a multiparty democracy in Nepal.One of the parties that decided to enter the local political fray, the Maoist Party, started violently trying to shift the country in another direction, replacing its parliamentary system with a people’s republic, similar to what was happening in China and the Soviet Union. This sparked a civil war that led to a whole lot of deaths, including those of the King and Crown Prince. The now-dead king’s brother stepped in, gave himself a bunch of new powers, and then tried to stomp the Maoist Party into submission.But there was a peaceful democratic revolution in the country in 2006, at which point the Maoists put down their arms and became a normal, nonviolent political party. Nepal then became a secular state, after being a Hindu kingdom for most of their modern history, and a few years later became a federal republic. It took a little while, and there was quite a bit of tumult in the meantime, but eventually, in 2015, the Nepalese government got a new constitution that divided the country into seven provinces and made Nepal a federal democratic republic.What I’d like to talk about today is what has happened in the past decade in Nepal, and how those happenings led to a recent, seemingly pretty successful, series of protests.—In early 2025, from March through early June, a series of protests were held across Nepal by pro-monarchy citizens and the local pro-monarchy party, initially in response to the former King’s visit, but later to basically just show discontentment with the current government.These protests were at least partly politically motivated, in the sense of being planned and fanned into larger conflagrations by that pro-monarchy party—not truly grassroots sort of thing—but they grew and grew, partly on the strength of opposition to the police response to earlier protests.That same distaste carried through the year, into September of 2025, when the Nepalese government announced a ban on 26 social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Youtube, because the companies behind these platforms ostensibly failed to register under the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology’s new rules that required, among other things, they have local liaisons that the government could meet with in person, and complain to if a given network failed to remove something they didn’t like quickly enough.The general sense about that ban is that while this failure to properly register was used as justification for shutting down these networks, which are incredibly popular in the country, the real reason the government wanted to shut them down at that moment was that a trend had emerged online in which the rich and powerful in the country, and especially their children, many of whom have become online influencers, were being criticized for their immense opulence and for bragging about their families’ vast wealth, while everyone else was comparably suffering.This became known as the Nepobaby or Nepo Kid trend, hashtag Nepobaby, which was a tag borrowed from Indonesia, and the general idea is that taxpayer money is being used to enriched a few powerful families at the expense of everyone else, and the kids of those powerful families were bragging about it in public spaces, not even bothering to hide their families’ misdeeds and corruption.This, perhaps understandably, led to a lot more discontent, and all that simmering anger led to online outcries, the government tried to stifle these outcries by shutting down these networks in the country, but that shut down, as is often the case in such situations, led to in-person protests, which started out as peaceful demonstrations in Kathmandu and surrounding areas, but which eventually became violent when the police started firing tear gas and rubber bullets at the crowds, causing 19 deaths and hundreds of injuries.The ban was implemented on September 4 and then lifted, after the initial protests, on September 8, but the government’s response seems to have made this a much bigger thing than it initially was, and maybe bigger than it would have become, sans that response.It’s worth mentioning here, too, that a lot of young people in Nepal rely on social media and messaging apps like Signal, which was also banned, for their livelihood. Both for social media related work, and for various sorts of remittances. And that, combined with an existing 20% youth unemployment rate, meant that young people were very riled up and unhappy with the state of things, already, and this ban just poured fuel on that flame.On that same note, the median age in Nepal is 25, it’s a relatively young country. So there are a lot of Gen Zers in Nepal, they’re the generation that uses social media the most, and because they rely so heavily on these networks to stay in touch with each other and the world, the ban triggered a mass outpouring of anger, and that led to huge protests in a very short time.These protests grew in scope, eventually leading to the burning of government buildings, the military was called in to help bring order, and ultimately the Home Minister, and then the Prime Minister, on September 8 and 9, respectively, resigned. A lot of the burning of government buildings happened after those resignations; protestors eventually burned the homes of government ministers, and the residences of the prime minister and president, as well.The protestors didn’t have any formal leadership, though there were attempts during the protests by local pro-monarchy parties and representatives to position the protests as pro-King—something most protestors have said is not the case, but you can see why that might have worked for them, considering those pro-monarchy protests earlier this year.That said, by September 10, the military was patrolling most major cities, and on the 11th, the president, head general, and Gen Z representatives for the protestors met to select an interim leader. They ended up using Discord, a chat app often used by gamers, to select a former Supreme Court Justice, Sushila Karki, as the interim prime minister, and the first woman to be prime minister in Nepalese history. Parliament was then dissolved, and March 5 was set as the date for the next election. Karki has said she will remain in office for no more than six months.As of September 13, all curfews had been lifted across Nepal, the prime minister was visiting injured protestors in hospitals, and relative calm had returned—though at least 72 people are said to have been killed during the protests, and more than 2,000 were injured.There are currently calls for unity across the political spectrum in Nepal, with everyone seeming to see the writing on the wall, that the youths have shown their strength, and there’s a fresh need to toe the new line that’s been established, lest the existing parties and power structures be completely toppled.There’s a chance that this newfound unity against government overreach and censorship will hold, though it’s important to note that the folks who were allegedly siphoning resources for their families were all able to escape the country, most without harm, due to assistance from police and the military, and that means they could influence things, from exile or after returning to Nepal, in the lead-up to that March election.It’s also possible that the major parties will do more to favor the huge Gen Z population in Nepal from this point forward, which could result in less unemployment and freer speech—though if the King and the pro-monarchy party is able to continue insinuating themselves into these sorts of conversations, positioning themselves as an alternative to the nepotism and corruption many people in the area have reasonably come to associated with this type of democracy, there could be a resurgent effort to bring the monarchy back by those who have already seen some success in this regard, quite recently.Show Noteshttps://restofworld.org/2025/nepal-gen-z-protest/https://apnews.com/article/nepal-ban-social-media-platform-3b42bbbd07bc9b97acb4df09d42029d5https://apnews.com/article/nepal-new-prime-minister-protests-karki-0f552615029eb12574c9587d8d76ec46https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crkj0lzlr3rohttps://kathmandupost.com/visual-stories/2025/09/08/gen-z-protest-in-kathmandu-against-corruption-and-social-media-banhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Nepalese_Gen_Z_protestshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Nepalese_pro-monarchy_protestshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepal This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about stablecoins, crypto assets, and conflicts of interest.We also discuss the crypto industry, political contributions, and regulatory guardrails.Recommended Book: Throne of Glass by Sarah J. MaasTranscriptA cryptocoin is a unit of cryptocurrency. A cryptocurrency is a type of digital currency that uses some kind of non-central means of managing its ledger—keeping track of who has how much of it, basically.There have been other types of digital currency over the years, but cryptocurrencies often rely on the blockchain or a similarly distributed means of keeping tabs on who has what. A blockchain is a database, often public, of users and a list of those users’ assets that’s distributed between users, and it makes use of some kind of consensus mechanism to determine who actually owns what.Some cryptocurrencies ebb and flow in value, and are thus traded more like a stock or other type of non-fixed, finite asset. Bitcoin, for instance, is often treated like gold or high-growth stocks. NFTs, similarly, create a sort of artificial scarcity, producing unique digital goods by putting their ownership on a blockchain or other proof-of-ownership system.Stablecoins are also cryptocurrencies, but instead of floating, their value growing and dropping based on the interest of would-be buyers, they are meant to maintain a steady value—to be stable, like a national currency.In order to achieve this, the folks who maintain stablecoins often use reserve assets to prop up their value. So if you produce a new stablecoin and want to issue a million of them, each worth one US dollar, you might accumulate a million actual US dollars, put those in a bank account, show everybody the number of dollars in that bank account, and then it’s pretty easy to argue that those stablecoins are each worth a dollar—each coin is a stand-in for one of the dollars in the bank.In a lot of cases, the people issuing these coins aim for this approach, but instead of doing a direct one-for-one, dollar for coin system, they’ll issue a million coins that are meant to be worth a dollar apiece, and they’ll put one-hundred-thousand dollars in a bank account, and the other 900,000 will be made up of bitcoin and stocks and other sorts of things that they can argue are worth at least that much.As of mid-2025, about $255 billion worth of stablecoins have been issued, and about 99% of them have been pegged to the US dollar; Tether’s USDT, Binance’s BUSD, and Circle’s USDC are all tethered to the USD, for instance, though other currencies are also used as peg values, including offerings by Tether and Circle that are pegged to the Euro.Stablecoins that are completely or mostly fiat-backed, which means they have a dollar for each coin issued in the bank somewhere, or close to that, tend to be on average more stable than commodity or crypto-backed stablecoins, which rely mostly or entirely on things like bitcoin or gold tucked away somewhere to justify their value. Which makes sense, as while you can argue, hey look, I have a million dollars worth of gold, and I’m issuing a million coins, each worth a dollar, that asset’s value can change day-to-day, and that can make the value of those coins precarious, at least compared to fiat-backed alternatives.Because stablecoins are not meant to change in value, they’re not useful as sub-ins for stocks or other sorts of interest-generating bets, like bitcoin. Instead, they’re primarily used by folks who want to trade cryptoassets for other sorts of cryptoassets, for those who want to avoid paying taxes, or want to otherwise hide their wealth, and for those who want to transfer money in such a way that they can avoid government sanctions and/or tariffs on those sorts of transfers.What I’d like to talk about today is a new US federal law, the GENIUS Act, which was heavily pushed by the crypto industry, and which looks likely to make stablecoins a lot more popular, for better and for worse.—The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act, or GENIUS Act, was introduced in the Senate by a Republican senator from Tennessee in May of 2025, was passed in June with a bipartisan vote of 68-30—the majority of Republicans and about half of Democratic senators voting in favor of it—and after the House passed it a month later, President Trump signed it into law on July 18.Again, this legislation was heavily pushed by the crypto industry, which generously funded a lot of politicians, mostly Republican, but on both sides of the aisle, in recent years, as it serves folks who want a broader reach for existing stablecoins, and who want to see more stablecoins emerge and flourish, as part of a larger and richer overall crypto industries.Folks who are against this Act, and other laws like it that have been proposed in recent years, contend that while it’s a good idea to have some kind of regulation in place for the crypto industry, this approach isn’t the right one, as it basically gives the tech world free rein to run their own pseudo-banks, without being subject to the same regulations as actual banks.Which isn’t great, according to this argument, as actual banks have to live up to all sorts of standards, most of them oriented around protecting people from the folks running the banks who might otherwise take advantage of them. Those regulations are especially cumbersome in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, because that severe global economic downturn was in large part caused by exactly these sorts of abuses: bankers going wild with lending mis-labeled assets, those in charge of these banks pocketing a whole lot of money, lots of people losing everything, and lots of institutions going under, leaving those people and the government with the bill, while the folks who did bad things mostly got off scott free.The goal of these bank regulations is to keep that kind of thing from happening again, while also keeping banks from overtly taking advantage of their customers, who often don’t know much about the banking options and assets they’re being sold on.Allowing tech companies to do very similar things, but without those regulations, seems imprudent, then, because, first, tech companies have shown themselves to be not just willing, but often thrilled to grab whatever they can and get slapped on the wrist for it, later, moving fast and breaking things, basically, and then paying the fines after they’ve made a fortune, and if they’re allowed to step into this space without the same regulations as banks, that gives them a huge competitive advantage over actual financial institutions.It’s a bit like if there were a food company that was allowed to dodge food industry regulations, as was thus able to cut their flour with sawdust and sell it to people at the same price as the real thing. People would suffer, their competition, which sells actual flour would suffer, because they wouldn’t be able to compete with a company that doesn’t play by the same rules, and the companies that sell the inferior products without anyone being able to stop them would probably get away with it for a while, before then closing up shop, pocketing all that money, and starting over again with a different name.This is how things work in a lot of countries with weak regulatory systems, and it creates so much distrust in the economic sphere that things cost more, the quality of everything is very low, and it’s nearly impossible to ever punish those who cause and perpetuate harm.That’s at the root of many arguments against the GENIUS Act: concerns that a lack of consumer protections will lead to a situation in which we have growing systemic risk, caused by tech entities taking bigger and bigger risks with other people’s money, like in the buildup to the 2008 recession, while simultaneously more legit institutions are elbowed out, unable to compete because they have to spend more and work harder to adhere to the regulations that the new players can ignore.It’s worth mentioning here, too, that the Trump family has issued their own cryptocoins, and reportedly already profited to the tune of several billion dollars as a result of that issuance, that the Trumps have their own stablecoin, which they’re promoting as an upgrade to the US dollar, that the early backers of these coins include foreign governments and their interconnected companies, like the Emirati-backed MGX, that the Trump children have their own crypto-asset companies, including one that’s listed on the Nasdaq, and which is profiting from the increasing popularity and legalization of the industry in the US, and that Trump’s media company, which owns Truth Social, also has a multi-billion-dollar bitcoin portfolio, alongside a whole lot of other crypto-coins, which the president has been pushing, and his family has been promoting overseas, using his name and office.All of which points at another conflict of interest issue here, that the president and his family seem to be self-enriching at an incredibly rapid pace and at a very high level, in part by pushing this and similar legislation.People in the crypto industry lavishly spent on his campaign, and they are entwined with his family’s business interests, which makes it difficult to separate what might be good for the country, in an objective way, from what’s good for Trump and his family, in the sense of using the office to grow wealthier and wealthier—and that’s true both in the sense that crypto-assets allegedly allow his family to take bribes in a fairly anonymous and deniable way, but also in the sense that people who buy his memecoins and buy into his stablecoin ventures and buy more bitcoin and similar assets that he already holds, also increase the value of his existing assets, and using the office of the presidency to enrich oneself in that way is the sort of thing they never really made illegal because they didn’t think anyone would be brazen or shameless enough to do it.There’s a lot going on here, then, and while there are some arguments that this sort of legislation is a good starting point to get some eventual, actual guardrails on the crypto industry in the US, the concerns related to those tech world incentives, and the possibility and reality of the president and his family profiting from this legislation, would seem to make this effort a lot more questionable than prudent, and loaded with a lot more downsides than upsides, even if, again, the majority of lawmakers voted for it, and a lot of people are excited about it for all sorts of reasons.Show Noteshttps://www.wired.com/story/genius-act-loophole-stablecoins-banks/https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/07/stablecoin-regulation-genius-act/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GENIUS_Acthttps://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-stablecoins-congress-cryptocurrency-94fa3c85e32ec6fd5a55576cf46e58eahttps://advocacy.consumerreports.org/press_release/senate-oks-genius-act-without-safeguards-needed-to-protect-consumers-and-the-financial-system-from-stablecoin-risks/https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/03/politics/crypto-trump-bitcoin-wlfi-stablecoin-analysishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrencyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stablecoin This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about cyberespionage, China, and asymmetrical leverage.We also discuss political firings, hardware infiltration, and Five Eyes.Recommended Book: The Fourth Turning Is Here by Neil HoweTranscriptIn the year 2000, then-General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang Zemin (jong ZEM-in), approved a plan to develop so-called “cyber coercive capabilities”—the infrastructure for offensive hacking—partly as a consequence of aggressive actions by the US, which among other things had recently bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade as part of the NATO campaign in Yugoslavia.The US was a nuclear power with immense military capabilities that far outshone those of China, and the idea was that the Chinese government needed some kind of asymmetrical means of achieving leverage against the US and its allies to counter that. Personal tech and the internet were still relatively young in 2000—the first iPhone wouldn’t be released for another seven years, for context—but there was enough going on in the cyber-intelligence world that it seemed like a good point of leverage to aim for.The early 2000s Chairman of the CCP, Hu Jintao, backed this ambition, citing the burgeoning threat of instability-inducing online variables, like those that sparked the color revolutions across Europe and Asia, and attack strategies similar to Israel’s Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran as justification, though China’s growing economic dependence on its technological know-how was also part of the equation; it could evolve its capacity in this space relatively quickly, and it had valuable stuff that was targetable by foreign cyberattacks, so it was probably a good idea to increase their defenses, while also increasing their ability to hit foreign targets in this way—that was the logic here.The next CCP Chairman, Xi Jinping, doubled-down on this effort, saying that in the cyber world, everyone else was using air strikes and China was still using swords and spears, so they needed to up their game substantially and rapidly.That ambition seems to have been realized: though China is still reportedly regularly infiltrated by foreign entities like the US’s CIA, China’s cybersecurity firms and state-affiliated hacker groups have become serious players on the international stage, pulling off incredibly complex hacks of foreign governments and infrastructure, including a campaign called Volt Typhoon, which seems to have started sometime in or before 2021, but which wasn’t discovered by US entities until 2024. This campaign saw Chinese hackers infiltrating all sorts of US agencies and infrastructure, initially using malware, and then entwining themselves with the operating systems used by their targets, quietly syphoning off data, credentials, and other useful bits of information, slowly but surely becoming even more interwoven with the fabric of these systems, and doing so stealthily in order to remain undetected for years.This effort allowed hackers to glean information about the US’s defenses in the continental US and in Guam, while also helping them breach public infrastructure, like Singapore’s telecommunications company, Singtel. It’s been suggested that, as with many Chinese cyberattacks, this incursion was a long-game play, meant to give the Chinese government the option of both using private data about private US citizens, soldiers, and people in government for manipulation or blackmail purposes, or to shut down important infrastructure, like communications channels or electrical grids, in the event of a future military conflict.What I’d like to talk about today is another, even bigger and reportedly more successful long-term hack by the Chinese government, and one that might be even more disruptive, should there ever be a military conflict between China and one of the impacted governments, or their allies.—Salt Typhoon is the name that’s been given to a so-called '“advanced persistent threat actor,” which is a formal way of saying hacker or hacker group, by Microsoft, which plays a big role in the cybersecurity world, especially at this scale, a scale involving not just independent hackers, but government-level cyberespionage groups.This group is generally understood to be run out of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, or MSS, and though it’s not usually possible to say something like that for certain, hence the “generally understood” component of that statement, often everyone kind of knows who’s doing what, but it’s imprudent to say so with 100% certainty, as cyberespionage, like many other sorts of spy stuff, is meant to be a gray area where governments can knock each other around without leading to a shooting war. If anyone were to say with absolute certainty, yes, China is hacking us, and it’s definitely the government, and they’re doing a really good job of it, stealing all our stuff and putting us at risk, that would either require the targeted government to launch some sort of counterstrike against China, or would leave that targeted government looking weak, and thus prone to more such incursions and attacks, alongside any loss of face they might suffer.So there’s a lot of hand-waving and alluding in this sphere of diplomacy and security, but it’s basically understood that Salt Typhoon is run by China, and it’s thought that they’ve been operating since at least 2020.Their prime function seems to be stealing as much classified data as they can from governments around the world, and scooping up all sorts of intellectual property from corporations, too.China’s notorious for collecting this kind of IP and then giving it to Chinese companies, which have become really good at using such IP, copying it, making it cheaper, and sometimes improving upon it in other ways, as well. This government-corporation collaboration model is fundamental to the operation of China’s economy, and the dynamic between its government, it’s military, its intelligence services, and its companies, all of which work together in various ways.It’s estimated that Salt Typhoon has infiltrated more than 200 targets in more than 80 countries, and alongside corporate entities like AT&T and Verizon, they also managed to scoop up private text messages from Kamala Harris’ and Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns in 2024, using hacks against phone services to do so.Three main Chinese tech companies allegedly helped Salt Typhoon infiltrate foreign telecommunications companies and internet service providers, alongside hotel, transportation, and other sorts of entities, which allowed them to not just grab text messages, but also track people, keeping tabs on their movements, which again, might be helpful in future blackmail or even assassination operations.Those three companies seem to be real-deal, actual companies, not just fronts for Chinese intelligence, but the government was able to use them, and the services and products they provide, to sneak malicious code into all kinds of vital infrastructure and all sorts of foreign corporations and agencies—which seems to support concerns from several years ago about dealing with Chinese tech companies like Huawei; some governments decided not to work with them, especially in building-out their 5G communications infrastructure, due to the possibility that the Chinese government might use these ostensibly private companies as a means of getting espionage software or devices into these communications channels or energy grids. The low prices Huawei offered just wasn’t worth the risk.The US government announced back in 2024 that Salt Typhoon had infiltrated a bunch of US telecommunications companies and broadband networks, and that routers manufactured by Cisco were also compromised by this group. The group was also able to get into ISP services that US law enforcement and intelligence services use to conduct court-authorized wiretaps; so they weren’t just spying on individuals, they were also spying on other government’s spies and those they were spying on.Despite all these pretty alarming findings, in the midst of the investigation into these hacks, the second US Trump administration fired the government’s Cyber Safety Review Board, which was thus unable to complete its investigation into Salt Typhoon’s intrusion.The FBI has since issued a large bounty for information about those involved in Salt Typhoon, but that only addresses the issue indirectly, and there’s still a lot we don’t know about this group, the extent of their hacking, and where else they might still be embedded, in part because the administration fired those looking into it, reportedly because the administration didn’t like this group also looking into Moscow’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election, and Salt Typhoon’s potential interference with the 2024 presidential election, both of which Trump won.The US government has denied these firings are in any way political, saying they intend to focus on cyber offense rather than defense, and pointing out that the current approach to investigating these sorts of things was imperfect; which is something that most outside organizations would agree on.That said, there are concerns that these firings, and other actions against the US’s cyberthreat defensive capabilities, are revenge moves against people and groups that have said the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost to Joe Biden, was the most secure and best-run election in US history; which flies in the face of Trump’s preferred narrative that he won in 2020—something he’s fond of repeating, though without evidence, and with a vast body of evidence against his claim.The US has also begun pulling away from long-time allies that it has previously collaborated with in the cyberespionage and cyberdefense sphere, including its Five Eyes partners, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.Since Tulsi Gabbard was installed as the Director of National Intelligence by Trump’s new administration, US intelligence services have been instructed to withhold information about negotiations with Russia and Ukraine from these allies; something that’s worrying intelligence experts, partly because this move seems to mostly favor Russia, and partly because it represents one more wall, of many, that the administration seems to be erecting between the US and these allies. Gabbard herself is also said to be incredibly pro-Russian, so while that may not be influencing this decision, it’s easy to understand why many allies and analysts are concerned that her loyalties might be divided in this matter.So what we have is a situation in which political considerations and concerns, alongside divided priorities and loyalties within several governments, but the US in particular right now, might be changing the layout of, and perhaps even weakening, cybersecurity and cyberespionage services at the very moment these services might be most necessary, because a foreign government has managed to install itself in all kinds of agencies, infrastructure, and corporations.That presence could allow China to milk these entities for information and stolen intellectual property, but it could also put the Chinese government in a very favorable position, should some kind of conflict break out, including but not limited to an invasion of Taiwan; if the US’s electrical grids or telecommunications services go down, or the country’s military is unable to coordinate with itself, or with its allies in the Pacific, at the moment China invades, there’s a non-zero chance that would impact the success of that invasion in China’s favor.Again, this is a pretty shadowy playing field even at the best of times, but right now there seems to be a lot happening in the cyberespionage space, and many of the foundations that were in place until just recently, are also being shaken, shattered, or replaced, which makes this an even more tumultuous, uncertain moment, with heightened risks for everybody, though maybe the opposite for those attacking these now more-vulnerable bits of infrastructure and vital entities.Show Noteshttps://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/china-used-three-private-companies-hack-global-telecoms-us-says-rcna227543https://media.defense.gov/2025/Aug/22/2003786665/-1/-1/0/CSA_COUNTERING_CHINA_STATE_ACTORS_COMPROMISE_OF_NETWORKS.PDFhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/us/politics/trump-loomer-haugh-cyberattacks-elections.htmlhttps://www.france24.com/en/americas/20250826-has-the-us-shut-its-five-eyes-allies-out-of-intelligence-on-ukraine-russia-peace-talkshttps://www.axios.com/2025/09/04/china-salt-typhoon-fbi-advisory-us-datahttps://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/chinese-spies-hit-more-than-80-countries-in-salt-typhoon-breach-fbi-reveals-59b2108fhttp://axios.com/2025/08/02/china-usa-cyberattacks-microsoft-sharepointhttps://www.axios.com/2024/12/03/salt-typhoon-china-phone-hackshttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/04/world/asia/china-hack-salt-typhoon.htmlhttps://www.euronews.com/2025/09/04/trump-and-jd-vance-among-targets-of-major-chinese-cyberattack-investigators-sayhttps://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12798https://www.fcc.gov/document/implications-salt-typhoon-attack-and-fcc-responsehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoonhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_global_telecommunications_hackhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_interference_in_the_2024_United_States_electionshttps://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/how_does_china_keep_stealing/https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Releases-Statements/Press-Release-View/Article/4287371/nsa-and-others-provide-guidance-to-counter-china-state-sponsored-actors-targeti/https://chooser.crossref.org/?doi=10.2307%2Fjj.16040335https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwarfare_and_Chinahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volt_Typhoon This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about the RSF, coups, and the liberal world order.We also discuss humanitarian aid, foreign conflicts, and genocide.Recommended Book: Inventing the Renaissance by Ada PalmerTranscriptIn 2019, a military government took over Sudan, following a successful coup d'état against then-President Omar al-Bashir, who had been in power for thirty years. al-Bashir’s latter years were plagued by popular demonstrations against rising costs of living and pretty abysmal living standards, and the government lashed out against protestors violently, before then dissolving local government leaders and their offices, replacing them with hand-picked military and intelligence officers. After he responded violently to yet another, even bigger protest, the military launched their coup, and the protestors pivoted to targeting them, demanding a civilian-run democracy.Just two months later, after unsuccessful negotiations between the new military government and the folks demanding they step aside to allow a civilian government to take charge, the military leaders massacred a bunch civilians who hosted a sit-in protest. Protestors shifted to a period of sustained civil disobedience and a general strike, and the government agreed to hold elections in 2022, three years later, and said that they would investigate the massacre their soldiers committed against those protestors. They also established a joint civilian-military unity government that would run things until the new, civilian government was eventually formed.In late-2021, though, the Sudanese military launched another coup against the unity government, and that council was dissolved, a state of emergency was declared, and all the important people who were helping the country segue back into a democracy were arrested. A new military-only junta was formed, incorporating the two main military groups that were running things, at that point.In 2023, those two military bodies that were working together to run Sudan via this military junta, the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group that were made into a sort of official part of the country’s military, while remaining separate from it, and the official Sudanese army, both started aggressively recruiting soldiers and taunting each other with military maneuvers. On April 15 that year, they started firing on each other.This conflict stemmed from the Sudanese military demanding that the RSF dissolve itself, all their people integrating into the country’s main military apparatus, but some kind of stand-off seemed to be a long time coming, as the RSF started its recruiting efforts earlier that year, and built up its military resources in the capital as early as February. But as I mentioned, this tinderbox erupted into a shooting war in April, beginning in the capital city, Khartoum, before spreading fast to other major cities.So what eventually became a Sudanese civil, which at this point has been ongoing for nearly 2.5 years, began in April of 2023, was long-simmering before that, is between two heavily armed military groups that ran the country together for a few years, and which both claim to be the rightful leaders or owners of the country, and they’re fighting each other in heavily populated areas.This war was also kicked off and is now sustained in part by ethnic conflicts between the main belligerents, which includes the aforementioned Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces, but also the Sudan Liberation Movement, which governs a fairly remote and self-sufficient mountainous area in the southern part of the country, and the al-Hilu movement, which supports the RSF’s efforts in the region.What I’d like to talk about today is what’s happening on the ground in Sudan, in the third year of this conflict, and at a moment when the world’s attention seems to have refocused elsewhere, major governments that would have previously attempted to stop the civil war have more or less given up on doing so, and the Sudanese civilians who have been pulled into the conflict, or who have been forced to flee their homes as a consequence of this war, have been left without food, shelter, or any good guys to cheer for.—Sudan has been plagued by coups since it gained independence from the UK and Egypt in 1956; it’s seen 20 coup attempts, 7 of them successful, including that most recent one in 2019, since independence.This region also has a recent history of genocide, perhaps most notably in the western Darfur region, where an estimated quarter of a million people from a trio of ethnic groups were killed between 2003 and 2005, alone, and something like 2.7 million people were displaced, forced to flee the systematic killings, strategically applied sexual violence, and other abuses by the Sudanese military and the local, rebel Janjaweed militias, which were often armed by the government and tasked with weeding out alleged rebel sympathizers in the region.This new civil war is on a completely different scale, though. As of April of 2025, two years into the conflict, it’s estimated that about 12.5 million people have been displaced, forced from their homes due to everything being burned down or bombed, due to threats from local military groups, killing and assaulting and forcibly recruiting civilians to their cause, and due to a lack of resources, the food and water and shelter all grabbed by these military forces and denied to those who are just trying to live their lives; and that’s true of locally sourced stuff, but also humanitarian aide that makes it into the country—it’s grabbed by the people with guns, and the people without guns are left with nothing.More than 3.3 million Sudanese people are estimated to have fled the country entirely, and recent figures show that around 25 million people are facing extreme levels of hunger, on the verge of starving to death, including about five million children and their mothers who are essentially wasting away. There are reports of people eating leaves and charcoal, just to get something in their stomachs, and photo evidence of these unmoving crowds of skeletal people who are desperate to get anything, any kind of nutrition at all, any clean water, still make it out of the country, though less and less, as it’s becoming more difficult for reporters to make it into and out of the area, safely, and the internet and other communication services, where they’re still available, are often shut down.Aid agencies have said that this civil war has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and even the US government, which especially right now has been very hesitant to say anything about foreign conflicts, has made it pretty clear that they consider this to be a genocide; there are conscious, intentional, obviously planned efforts to systematically wipe out different ethnic groups, and to cleanse areas of hated political and religious rivals, but this genocide is being carried out at the exact moment that many of the world’s major, wealthy governments, which historically would have tried to step in and remedy the situation in some way—often ham-handedly, sometimes by supporting one side or the other to try to gain influence in the region, but almost always by also airdropping food and medical goods and other resources into the area to try to help civilians—these governments are mostly pulling back from those sorts of efforts.Some analysts and regional experts have suggested that this points toward a new normal in the global geopolitical playing field; the so-called liberal world order that helped organize things, that established rules and norms from the end of WWII onward, and which incentivized everyone playing nice with each other, not invading each other, not committing genocide, and focusing on trade over war, is falling apart, the United States in particular deciding to stop funding things, stop participating, deciding to antagonize the allies that helped it maintain this state of affairs, and to basically drop anything that seems to much like a responsibility to people not in the United States. And a lot of other governments are either scrambling to figure out what that means for them, or deciding that they can afford to do something of the same. China, for instance, while stepping in to fill some of those voids, strategically, has also pulled back on some of its humanitarian efforts, because it no longer needs to invest as much in such things to compete with the US, which no longer seems to be competing in that space at all, with rare exceptions.Conflicts in Africa, also with rare exceptions, also just tend to get less attention than conflicts elsewhere, and there are all sorts of theories as to why this might be the case, from simple racism to the idea that areas with more economic potential are more valuable as allies or supplicants, so wealthy nations with the ability to do something will tend to focus their resources on areas that are more strategically vital or wealth-generating, so as to recoup their investment.Whatever the specifics and rationales, though, Sudan has long been conflict-prone, but this civil war seems to be locking the area into a state of total war—where nothing is off the table, and terror against civilians, and to a certain degree wiping out one’s enemies completely, salting the earth, killing all the civilians so they can never threaten your force’s dominance again, is becoming fundamental to everyone’s military strategy—and that state of total war, in addition to be just horrific all by itself, also threatens to roil the rest of the area, including the far more globally integrated and thus well supported and funded Horn of Africa region, which is strategically vital for many nations, due to its adjacency to the Middle East and several vital ports, and the Sahel, which is a strip of land that stretches across the continent, just south of the Sahara desert, and which in modern history has been especially prone to military coups and periods of violence, at times verging on genocide, and which in recent decades has seen a bunch of democratic governments toppled and replaced by military juntas that have done their best to completely disempower all possible future opposition, at times by committing what look a lot like mini-genocides.This conflict, all by itself, then, is already one of the worst humanitarian situations the world has seen, but the confluence of international distraction—much of our attention and the majority of our resources focused on the also horrible situations in Gaza and Ukraine, and the specter of great power competitions that might arise as a result of Ukraine, or of China deciding to invade Taiwan—alongside the pullback from humanitarian funding, and the seeming distaste previously internationally involved entities, like the US and China, now seem to have when it comes to playing peacemaker, or attempted peacemaker, in these sorts of conflicts.All of which would seem to make it a lot more likely that this conflict, and others like it, will continue to play out, and may even reach a scale that permanently scars Sudan and its people, and which possibly even cascades into a series of regional conflicts, some interconnected, and some merely inspired by the brazenness they can clearly see across the border, and the seeming lack of consequences for those committing these sorts of atrocities in order to attain more power and control.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_genocidehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023%E2%80%93present)https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/09/sudan-civil-war-humanitarian-crisis/683563/?gift=201cWZnM2XBz2eP81zy0pG9Zt_k9jZnrEhnY7lvH1ZQhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/08/13/sudan-humanitarian-global-world-order-neglect-conflict/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/19/world/africa/sudan-usaid-famine.htmlhttps://www.reuters.com/world/africa/world-food-programme-reduce-food-support-sudan-due-funding-shortages-2025-04-25/https://www.eurasiareview.com/25042025-sudan-war-is-a-global-crisis-in-the-making-analysis/https://apnews.com/article/un-sudan-darfur-war-anniversary-paramilitary-government-dbfff6244d935f595fb7649a87a6e073https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sudans-world-warhttps://news.un.org/en/story/2025/04/1162576https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/04/1162096https://reliefweb.int/report/sudan/sudan-situation-map-weekly-regional-update-18-aug-2025https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2wryz4gw7ohttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/opinion/sudan-genocide-famine.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_revolutionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023%E2%80%93present)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Sudanese_coup_d%27%C3%A9tathttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudan_People%27s_Liberation_Movement%E2%80%93Northhttps://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/horn-africa/sudan/stopping-sudans-descent-full-blown-civil-warhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coups_d%27%C3%A9tat_in_Sudan This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about General Motors, the Great Recession, and semiconductors.We also discuss Goldman Sachs, US Steel, and nationalization.Recommended Book: Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek ThompsonTranscriptNationalization refers to the process through which a government takes control of a business or business asset.Sometimes this is the result of a new administration or regime taking control of a government, which decides to change how things work, so it gobbles up things like oil companies or railroads or manufacturing hubs, because that stuff is considered to be fundamental enough that it cannot be left to the whims, and the ebbs and eddies and unpredictable variables of a free market; the nation needs reliable oil, it needs to be churning out nails and screws and bullets, so the government grabs the means of producing these things to ensure nothing stops that kind of output or operation.That more holistic reworking of a nation’s economy so that it reflects some kind of socialist setup is typically referred to as socialization, though commentary on the matter will still often refer to the individual instances of the government taking ownership over something that was previously private as nationalization.In other cases these sorts of assets are nationalized in order to right some kind of perceived wrong, as was the case when the French government, in the wake of WWII, nationalized the automobile company Renault for its alleged collaboration with the Nazis when they occupied France.The circumstances of that nationalization were questioned, as there was a lot of political scuffling between capitalist and communist interests in the country at that time, and some saw this as a means of getting back against the company’s owner, Louis Renault, for his recent, violent actions against workers who had gone on strike before France’s occupation—but whatever the details, France scooped up Renault and turned it into a state-owned company, and in 1994, the government decided that its ownership of the company was keeping its products from competing on the market, and in 1996 it was privatized and they started selling public shares, though the French government still owns about 15% of the company.Nationalization is more common in some non-socialist nations than others, as there are generally considered to be significant pros and cons associated with such ownership.The major benefit of such ownership is that a government owned, or partially government owned entity will tend to have the government on its side to a greater or lesser degree, which can make it more competitive internationally, in the sense that laws will be passed to help it flourish and grow, and it may even benefit from direct infusions of money, when needed, especially with international competition heats up, and because it generally allows that company to operate as a piece of government infrastructure, rather than just a normal business.Instead of being completely prone to the winds of economic fortune, then, the US government can ensure that Amtrak, a primarily state-owned train company that’s structured as a for-profit business, but which has a government-appointed board and benefits from federal funding, is able to keep functioning, even when demand for train services is low, and barbarians at the gate, like plane-based cargo shipping and passenger hauling, becomes a lot more competitive, maybe even to the point that a non-government-owned entity may have long-since gone under, or dramatically reduced its service area, by economic necessity.A major downside often cited by free-market people, though, is that these sorts of companies tend to do poorly, in terms of providing the best possible service, and in terms of making enough money to pay for themselves—services like Amtrak are structured so that they pay as much of their own expenses as much as possible, for instance, but are seldom able to do so, requiring injections of resources from the government to stay afloat, and as a result, they have trouble updating and even maintaining their infrastructure.Private companies tend to be a lot more agile and competitive because they have to be, and because they often have leadership that is less political in nature, and more oriented around doing better than their also private competition, rather than merely surviving.What I’d like to talk about today is another vital industry that seems to have become so vital, like trains, that the US government is keen to ensure it doesn’t go under, and a stake that the US government took in one of its most historically significant, but recently struggling companies.—The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was a law passed by the US government after the initial whammy of the Great Recession, which created a bunch of bailouts for mostly financial institutions that, if they went under, it was suspected, would have caused even more damage to the US economy.These banks had been playing fast and loose with toxic assets for a while, filling their pockets with money, but doing so in a precarious and unsustainable manner.As a result, when it became clear these assets were terrible, the dominos started falling, all these institutions started going under, and the government realized that they would either lose a significant portion of their banks and other financial institutions, or they’d have to bail them out—give them money, basically.Which wasn’t a popular solution, as it looked a lot like rewarding bad behavior, and making some businesses, private businesses, too big to fail, because the country’s economy relied on them to some degree. But that’s the decision the government made, and some of these institutions, like Goldman Sachs, had their toxic assets bought by the government, removing these things from their balance sheets so they could keep operating as normal. Others declared bankruptcy and were placed under government control, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were previously government supported, but not government run.The American International Group, the fifth largest insurer in the world at that point, was bought by the US government—it took 92% of the company in exchange for $141.8 billion in assistance, to help it stay afloat—and General Motors, not a financial institution, but a car company that was deemed vital to the continued existence of the US auto market, went bankrupt, the fourth largest bankruptcy in US history. The government allowed its assets to be bought by a new company, also called GM, which would then function as normal, which allowed the company to keep operating, employees to keep being paid, and so on, but as part of that process, the company was given a total of $51 billion by the government, which took a majority stake in the new company in exchange.In late-2013, the US government sold its final shares of GM stock, having lost about $10.7 billion over the course of that ownership, though it’s estimated that about 1.5 million jobs were saved as a result of keeping GM and Chrysler, which went through a similar process, afloat, rather than letting them go under, as some people would have preferred.In mid-August of this year, the US government took another stake in a big, historically significant company, though this time the company in question wasn’t going through a recession-sparked bankruptcy—it was just falling way behind its competition, and was looking less and less likely to ever catch up.Intel was founded 1968, and it designs, produces, and sells all sorts of semiconductor products, like the microprocessors—the computer chips—that power all sorts of things, these days.Intel created the world’s first commercial computer chip back in 1971, and in the 1990s, its products were in basically every computer that hit the market, its range and dominance expanding with the range and dominance of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, achieving a market share of about 90% in the mid- to late-1990s.Beginning in the early 2000s, though, other competitors, like AMD, began to chip away at Intel’s dominance, and though it still boasts a CPU market share of around 67% as of Q2 of 2025, it has fallen way behind competitors like Nvidia in the graphics card market, and behind Samsung in the larger semiconductor market.And that’s a problem for Intel, as while CPUs are still important, the overall computing-things, high-tech gadget space has been shifting toward stuff that Intel doesn’t make, or doesn’t do well.Smaller things, graphics-intensive things. Basically all the hardware that’s powered the gaming, crypto, and AI markets, alongside the stuff crammed into increasingly small personal devices, are things that Intel just isn’t very good at, and doesn’t seem to have a solid means of getting better at, so it’s a sort of aging giant in the computer world—still big and impressive, but with an outlook that keeps getting worse and worse, with each new generation of hardware, and each new innovation that seems to require stuff it doesn’t produce, or doesn’t produce good versions of.This is why, despite being a very unusual move, the US government’s decision to buy a 10% stake in Intel for $8.9 billion didn’t come as a total surprise.The CEO of Intel had been raising the possibility of some kind of bailout, positioning Intel as a vital US asset, similar to all those banks and to GM—if it went under, it would mean the US losing a vital piece of the global semiconductor pie. The government already gave Intel $2.2 billion as part of the CHIPS and Science Act, which was signed into law under the Biden administration, and which was meant to shore-up US competitiveness in that space, but that was a freebie—this new injection of resources wasn’t free.Response to this move has been mixed. Some analysts think President Trump’s penchant for netting the government shares in companies it does stuff for—as was the case with US Steel giving the US government a so-called ‘golden share’ of its company in exchange for allowing the company to merge with Japan-based Nippon Steel, that share granting a small degree of governance authority within the company—they think that sort of quid-pro-quo is smart, as in some cases it may result in profits for a government that’s increasingly underwater in terms of debt, and in others it gives some authority over future decisions, giving the government more levers to use, beyond legal ones, in steering these vital companies the way it wants to steer them.Others are concerned about this turn of events, though, as it seems, theoretically at least, anti-competitive. After all, if the US government profits when Intel does well, now that it owns a huge chunk of the company, doesn’t that incentivize the government to pass laws that favor Intel over its competitors? And even if the government doesn’t do anything like that overtly, doesn’t that create a sort of chilling effect on the market, making it less likely serious competitors will even emerge, because investors might be too spooked to invest in something that would be going up against a partially government-owned entity?There are still questions about the legality of this move, as it may be that the CHIPS Act doesn’t allow the US government to convert grants into equity, and it may be that shareholders will find other ways to rebel against the seeming high-pressure tactics from the White House, which included threats by Trump to force the firing of its CEO, in part by withholding some of the company’s federal grants, if he didn’t agree to giving the government a portion of the company in exchange for assistance.This also raises the prospect that Intel, like those other bailed-out companies, has become de facto too big to fail, which could lead to stagnation in the company, especially if the White House goes further in putting its thumb on the scale, forcing more companies, in the US and elsewhere, to do business with the company, despite its often uncompetitive offerings.While there’s a chance that Intel takes this influx of resources and support and runs with it, catching up to competitors that have left it in the dust and rebuilding itself into something a lot more internationally competitive, then, there’s also the chance that it continues to flail, but for much longer than it would have, otherwise, because of that artificial support and government backing.Show Noteshttps://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/did-trump-save-intel-not-really-2025-08-23/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/23/business/trump-intel-us-steel-nvidia.htmlhttps://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/intel-agrees-to-sell-the-us-a-10-stake-trump-says-hyping-great-deal/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11_reorganizationhttps://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/government-financial-bailout.asphttps://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amds-desktop-pc-market-share-hits-a-new-high-as-server-gains-slow-down-intel-now-only-outsells-amd-2-1-down-from-9-1-a-few-years-agohttps://www.spglobal.com/commodity-insights/en/news-research/latest-news/metals/062625-in-rare-deal-for-us-government-owns-a-piece-of-us-steelhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaulthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_enterprises_of_the_United_Stateshttps://247wallst.com/special-report/2021/04/07/businesses-run-by-the-us-government/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalizationhttps://www.amtrak.com/stakeholder-faqshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11_reorganization This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about flesh-eating screwworms, weeds, and the US cattle industry.We also discuss genetic modification, procreation, and tsetse flies.Recommended Book: 1177 BC by Eric H ClineTranscriptThe term ‘autocidal control‘ refers to a collection of techniques that are meant to control populations of some type of living thing, animal or plant, by disrupting their procreationary capacity.So rather than attempting to control pest by spraying poisons all over the place, or controlling plants you consider to be invasive weeds by launching huge weed-pulling efforts in the afflicted areas, you might instead figure out how to keep this current generation of pests and weeds from having as many offspring as they might otherwise have, and then repeat the process with the next generation, and the next, and so on, until the unwanted species is either eradicated in the relevant region, or reduced to such a small number that its presence is no longer such a big deal.There are all kinds of approaches one might take in trying to achieve this sort of outcome.Experimental genetic modification measures, for instance, have been tried in, so far at least, limited ways, the idea being to either make the disliked species less competitive in some way (by making them slower, and thus more likely to be eaten by predators, maybe), or by making them less likely to have offspring, or less likely to have fit offspring—the next generation becomes super slow and clumsy, or they’re carriers of a gene that keeps them from procreating as much, or at all.That approach seems like it could be effective, and there are quite a few efforts, globally, that’re working to refine and perfect it with mosquito species in particular, specifically the ones that are carriers of malaria-causing parasites and similar maladies that cause immense harm to local human (and other mammal) populations.There have also been attempts to spray mating grounds with pheromones that disrupt mating behavior, or to use what’s called the Autodissemination Augmented by Males, or ADAM approach, which has been used to decent effect in some trials, and which involves basically just sprinkling a bunch of male mosquitos with pesticide, releasing them into mosquito mating grounds, and then having them deliver those pesticides to the females they mate with.All of these efforts are meant to reduce populations via some procreationary mechanism, while also attempting to ameliorate some of the other issues associated with other, widely used pest- and weed-control approaches. Most of which rely on some kind of chemical being introduced into the right environment, that chemical helping to kill or disrupt these populations, but in many cases also leading to unwanted, and often initially unforeseen side effects, like those chemicals messing with other species, getting into the groundwater and possibly being associated with maladies in humans, and so on.What I’d like to talk about today is another approach, the sterile insect technique, why it’s become so popular in recent decades, and how it’s being used, today, to address a burgeoning population of a pest that was previously eliminated in North America using this technique, but which has recently become a problem, once more.—The New World screwworm fly is thus named because its larvae, its baby offspring, are planted in warm-blooded animals. These offspring eat not just dead tissues, like the maggots of other flies, but healthy tissues as well.These maggots are often deposited near wounds, like cuts or scrapes, but also injuries caused by the castration or dehorning of cattle, or orifices and other sensitive areas with soft tissue, like the corner of a host’s eye.They don’t typically infest humans, but it does happen, and they’re most likely to be found on wild and domesticated mammals, the females of the species depositing somewhere between 250 and 500 eggs in the flesh of their hosts, the maggots screwing their way deeper into their host’s flesh as they grow, burrowing and eating for the next three to seven days, at which point they fall off and enter the next stage of their lifecycle. By that point the host may already be dead, depending on the extent of the damage these things manage to cause in the interim.These flies were originally found across the Americas and on some Caribbean islands, and they have long been a headache for cattle ranchers in particular, as they will sometimes infect one cow or goat, and then work their way through the entire herd in relatively short order, causing enough damage to seriously injure or kill a whole lot of the rancher’s stock.As a result, humans have been trying to get rid of these things for ages, but nothing seemed to make much of a dent in their populations until the emergence of what’s called the sterile insect technique, which is exactly what it sounds like: a method of autocidal control that involves sterilizing members of the species, usually the males, and then releasing them back into the population.Variations on this concept were developed by a few different researchers in a few different places around the world in the lead-up to WWII, but just after that conflict, scientists working at the US Department of Agriculture realized that they could use x-rays to reliably sterilize male screwworm flies, and that if they did this to a large number of them, then released those males into the local population of screwworm flies, to the point where there are more sterilized males than non-sterilized ones, that would serve to dramatically reduce the size of the next generation. If you then repeat this over and over again, you can eventually wipe out the species in a given region, as they successfully showed in the early 1950s by eradicating all the screwworms on Sanibel Island in Florida.The same technique was then used to kill all the screwworms on the island of Curacao, off the coast of Venezuela—that kill-off achieved in just seven weeks. Over the next few decades, sterilized male flies were then released across other afflicted US states, and both Mexico and Belize were able to kill all their screwworms in the 1980s, followed by Central America in the 1990s.This approach was also applied to other pests, almost always those that either spread disease to humans, or threatened local industries, like cattle or agricultural industries.For instance, tsetse flies, carriers of a parasite that causes sleeping sickness, were entirely or almost entirely eradicated from Tanzania, Zanzibar, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and Uganda between the 1940s and late-1990s, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the carriers of dengue and yellow fever, were sterilized by a bacteria called Wolbachia in Queensland, Australia, in the late-20-teens, which reduced the populations of this disease-carrier in trial areas by 80%, and Japan eradicated the melon fly, an agricultural pest, in 1993.This approach to pest-control has become so popular that dozens of facilities have been set up in countries around the world, exclusively to breed and sterilize different species, which can then be shipped to where they will be released. The first of these facilities was built in Mexico in the 1960s, where Mexican fruit flies were bred and then shipped for release in Texas.It’s maybe fitting then that a new round of construction is happening, today, intending to combat the renewed presence of screwworms in Mexico, which have been making their way up into Texas via these two nations’ cattle industries.The US Department of Agriculture recently announced that it will be building a sterile screwworm fly facility in Texas, which has suffered due to the US’s recent decisions to halt the import of cattle from across the border in Mexico due to issues with screwworms hitching a ride on that cattle stock, and thus infiltrating US herds. The government tried several times to drop this cessation of imports, as the US cattle industry is pretty reliant on those imports, but each time they tried, new screwworm infestations were found, and the import halt was put back into place.US cattle populations are already at their lowest level in decades, and that’s impacting meat and dairy prices, while also putting other warm-blooded animals in the afflicted regions, especially Texas, at risk.The folks behind the new facility have said they hope to be up and running in relatively short order, aiming to be releasing sterile male New World screwworms into the wild within a year. This deployment will operate in tandem with other, more direct efforts, like fly traps and parasite-sniffing dogs stationed at ports of entry.The concerns here are not just theoretical: screwworms alone cause an estimated $1.5 billion in damage each year, and the cost of implementing a sterilization program of this kind usually adds up to something like a billion dollars, spread across decades; not a bad return on investment.These programs are not universally effective, though, as in some rare cases non-irradiated males have accidentally been shipped to their intended mating location, temporarily inflating rather than deflating population numbers. And while these programs are relatively cheap to operate on scale, the cost of producing enough sterilized males to make such an effort effective can be prohibitive when aimed at smaller regions, or when attempted by governments or agencies without the budget to see what can sometimes be a long-term project through.That said, this approach does seem to work very well when done correctly, and while its ecosystem impact is not zero, as, for instance, predators who eat these pests might suddenly find themselves without one of their staple food sources, which can lead to knock-on effects across the food web, it does seem to be one of the least foodweb ripple-producing approaches, as genetic modifications can theoretically lead to far more elaborate unforeseen consequences, and the widespread spraying of chemicals has semi-regularly led to die-offs and maladies in other local species, in addition to sometimes causing long-term, even fatal health problems for humans who rely on local food or water sources.Show Noteshttps://archive.is/20250815192422/https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/usda-build-texas-facility-fight-flesh-eating-screwworms-2025-08-15/https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2025/08/how-to-stop-flesh-eating-parasite-from-devastating-us-cattle-government-will-breed-billions-of-flies.htmlhttps://apnews.com/article/fly-factories-flesheating-parasite-cattle-texas-429ce91225bbab4a45c9040f1be356a5https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia_hominivoraxhttps://archive.is/14Rdkhttps://archive.is/afmt2https://archive.is/QfTvGhttps://archive.is/dxbcZhttps://www.oregonlive.com/business/2025/08/how-to-stop-flesh-eating-parasite-from-devastating-us-cattle-government-will-breed-billions-of-flies.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_techniquehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sterile_insect_technique_trialshttps://web.archive.org/web/20210416164524/http://www-iswam.iaea.org/drd/refs_files/195_The-Area-wide-SIT-Screwworm.pdfhttps://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/sterile-insect-technique-used-to-suppress-mosquito-disease-vectors-in-floridahttps://www.cdc.gov/mosquitoes/mosquito-control/genetically-modified-mosquitoes.htmlhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-30722-9https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4313646/ This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about tech bubbles, building moats, and infrastructure investment.We also discuss capital expenditure, data centers, and employee compensation.Recommended Book: The Art of Gathering by Priya ParkerTranscriptMany technology booms have early periods in which innovators have a first-mover advantage, and a lot of what happens in their industry is informed by the decisions those innovators make.After that—depending on the technology, but this is common enough to be considered a trend—after that there tends to be a period of build-out and consolidation amongst the people and business entities that survived that initial, innovation-focused throw-down.In the context of personal computers, this moment saw computer-makers like Microsoft and Apple scramble to pivot from figuring out what an operating system should look like and whether or not to use mice to navigate user interfaces, to a period in which they were rushing to scale-up the manufacture of now-essential, but previously comparably rare components: suitable screens for their monitors, chips that could power their increasingly graphical machines, and the magnetic materials necessary to produce floppy disks and spindle-based hard drives.There’s an initial period in which new ideas and approaches provide these entities with a moat that protects them against competition, in other words, but then the game they’re playing changes, the rules are more fully understood and to some degree locked into place and agreed upon, and instead of competing for the biggest, most brazen new ideas, they lock onto one set of ideas that seemed to be the best of what’s available at that moment and build on those, iterating them at a regular cadence, but focusing especially on scaling them.So at this second stage, they’re investing in the ability to out-produce their competition in some way, so they can eventually bypass that competition and (they hope) safely increase their prices and make a profit, as opposed to just larger and larger revenues with equal or greater expenses, continuing to be reliant on investor injections of capital, rather than generating their own surplus returns.By many analysts’ and insiders’ estimates, we’ve just entered that second stage in the generative AI industry. That’s the sort of AI that generates text and images and code and such, and it’s increasingly becoming a sort of commodity, rather than a new, hot things that few companies can offer the market.What I’d like to talk about today are the increasingly massive financial figures associated with this industry’s shift to that second stage of development, and why some of those insiders and analysts are voicing fresh concerns that this could all lead to a bubble, and possibly an historically large one.—There are many ways we could measure the growth of the AI industry over the years.The US market size, for instance, which is a measure of the value of AI-oriented companies based on how much shares of their company cost or would cost on the open market, has ballooned from just over $100 billion in 2022 to an estimated $174 billion in 2025. That figure is expected to grow at a not quite 20% compound annual growth rate through 2034, which, if accurate, would put this market, in the US alone, at more than $850 billion.Another metric we might use is that of capital expenditure, or capex, in this corner of the tech industry, which refers to the amount of money AI companies are using to buy, upgrade, or maintain their long-term assets, like new computer chips or the data centers they fill with those chips.The seven most valuable US tech companies—Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, NVIDIA, and Broadcom (that last spot formerly held by Tesla, which was dropped from this designation in late-2024)—just those seven companies have spent $102.5 billion on capex this last financial quarter (and most of that was from just four of them, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon, the remainder only spending something like $6.7 billion).That’s a staggering amount of money, and due to a recent drop in consumer demand—the money individual US citizens spend on things like food and clothes and smartphones and cars and all the other things people buy—AI-related capex, spending by these massive US tech companies, has added more to GDP growth than consumer spending for the past two quarters.All the things all the people in the US bought over the past two quarters did not cost as much, in aggregate, as what these companies spent during the same period, on new and existing assets. That’s pretty wild.And it’s the consequence, partly, of the shift in these companies’ focus from providing goods and services that relied heavily on people—salary and stock compensation, basically, which is not a capex expense, because its spent on employees, not stuff—to spending heavily on all that infrastructure that they believe will be required to help them compete with those other companies that are also frantically investing in the same.Whomever can built the biggest, baddest, most reliable and powerful data centers, and can get the AI-optimized chips to fill them, will have an advantage over their opponents in the new, developing tech world paradigm, it’s thought, so they’re pumping gobs of resources into exactly those sorts of assets, hoping to get ahead, build an insurmountable advantage, and put their competition out of business—or failing that, to establish themselves as the AI Coca-Cola, versus their opposition’s AI Mr. Pip.Similar dynamics are playing out elsewhere, especially in China, where the market could reach a value approximating today’s US AI market in 3-5 years, and several times that, up to $1.4 trillion, by 2030—though like all of these figures, it depends on how we choose to measure these sorts of things, including what counts as an AI company, and in China, several of their major AI players are heavily involved in automation, robotics, which itself is expected to be a $5 trillion industry in that country by 2050.Europe’s market is comparably smaller, as is its overall tech industry, but the AI market is now just shy of 15% of its total tech sector, up from 12% in 2022, and AI startups are attracting about a quarter of all VC funding in the bloc right now—so they’re starting from a less spendy start, but like pretty much everywhere the necessary knowledge and manufacturing base exists at the moment, the European AI market is growing a lot faster than anyone would have expected even just five years ago.And there are real-deal innovations coming out of this tech; these investments are flooding into AI companies because these technologies, this version of them, the generative AI stuff, has completely rewired the programming world, AI bots and agents helping coders achieve a lot more, faster, and non-coders make things they wouldn’t have been able to build lacking these tools, imperfect as many of those tools are, under the hood.We’re also seeing an explosion of other sorts of generated content, and the injection of these tools that make such content into Hollywood studios and consulting firms and government agencies, and everything in between, is causing equal parts panic and excitement, depending on whether you’re one of the people who feels like they might be laid off soon, replaced by software, or if you’re someone who profits from all those layoffs, and the payments from the companies that hope to save money by conducting them, replacing their comparably expensive employees with cheaper AI tools.Things have gotten so wild that Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has started offering compensation packages ranging from $200 million to more than a billion dollars to top AI talent. Meta’s AI spending is already massive, and could hit $72 billion this year, but the company has said it could hit $100 billion in 2026, while Microsoft’s leadership suggested their 2025 spending of $30 billion could balloon to $120 billion in 2026.OpenAI recently offered their employees large bonuses, in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars range, to counter those sorts of overtures from the likes of Meta, but there’s a lot of money flying around from all direction right now, much of it aimed at more AI infrastructure, or the relatively few people on the planet who understand this tech well enough to make a competitive difference in this industry.That’s…a lot of money. There’s just so much spending happening, so many resources sloshing around in this one space right now, and all this investment is predicated on the idea that AI will change everything, we’re stepping into a new paradigm, and those who control the AI, will basically own the next game. So they’re all trying to set things up so they win the next game, or at least have the best hand possible when it arrives.There have been increasingly loud arguments, made by long-time generative AI critics, but also, more recently, ardent AI boosters, that we might be running up against a wall of what these things can do for us; this version of the AI concept, at least.And these arguments got louder with OpenAI’s release of their long-teased GPT-5 model, which some expected to be true AGI, human-grade, flexible, omni-capable intelligence, while others thought it might be a mono-focused superintelligence of some kind: the perfect coder, the perfect image generator, something like that.What users got was not that. It seems to be better at some things, still not great at others.This was an incredibly expensive model to produce—the training costs alone are estimated to be something like a half-billion dollars, and that’s just a portion of the total costs of creating this sort of model—and what OpenAI served up, instead of something groundbreaking, was a slightly better, though in some ways seemingly the same or worse version of what everyone’s been playing with for years, now.There’s room for disagreement on this, as while there are some more objective tests for measuring models’ capabilities, a lot of it is circumstantial, and depends, among other things, on what you’re trying to do, how the systems are prompted, and so on.There’s also something to be said for cost-reductions and other sorts of benefits of new models, beyond raw power and capability.But this thud of a launch for what was supposed to be a sea-changing system has led to the ringing of some alarm bells, industry watchers wondering if we might be careening toward a bubble, at a moment in which, again, this segment of the tech industry is contributing more to the US’s GDP than all of consumer spending, combined.A bubble, to be clear, wouldn’t mean the collapse of the US economy, or even these companies, necessarily. It would mean a lot of AI entities going under, a lot of invested money lost, and a lot of people who suddenly don’t have jobs.Almost always there are a few players in these bubbly spaces that make it to the other side, though—eBay, for instance, survived the dotcom bubble intact, as did Amazon, PayPal, and Adobe, among many others.But the grand shakeout, the sifting for those that could survive a mammoth downturn, and the destruction of the rest, that’s a tough moment for those directly connected to the bubble-popping industry, and those adjacent to it: the folks who feed the employees who are now laid off, the suppliers of the light switches that go in all the data centers, etc.There are ripple effects to this sort of bubble pop moment, then, and though such sifting might be long-term beneficial, because it maybe weeds out some of the dead-weight and makes things more efficient in that space five or ten years in the future, that won’t help the folks who lose a lot of money when the industry shrinks, including those who have their money at banks that made bad bets, or insurance companies that did the same, with their customers resources.Everything’s great for everyone when these sorts of high-risk, high-reward bets are paying out, but when the golden goose of huge anticipated future profits disappears, that shakeout leaves a lot of entities and people with emptier pockets.None of which suggests this is going to happen; there’s a chance that we continue to see better and better models using the current, generative AI technology, or that some of these companies successfully pivot to another AI approach that bears better, next-step fruit, and things just keep getting more and more powerful and less and less expensive for everyone; that could theoretically lead to some pretty cool, broadly beneficial things.This sort of risk is lurking in the background of everything that’s happening, though, and while upbeat marketing messages and predictions about how cool it will all be when the next-step tools arrive can keep things going for a while, even lacking major milestones that can be pointed at to justify those claims, at some point we’ll probably need to see something really, truly different and novel, or the bottom could fall out, leaving those who were more careful tip-toeing into this collection of technologies looking less like they’re being left behind, and more like they took smart precautions and made safe, reliable investments.Show Noteshttps://www.precedenceresearch.com/us-artificial-intelligence-markethttps://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/artificial-intelligence/united-stateshttps://techcrunch.com/2024/12/23/ai-startups-attracted-25-of-europes-vc-funding/https://archive.is/20250809000924/https://www.theverge.com/command-line-newsletter/756561/openai-employees-bonus-sam-altman-ai-talent-warshttps://paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex-ate-the-economy/https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/silicon-valley-ai-infrastructure-capex-cffe0431https://archive.is/20250809000924/https://www.theverge.com/command-line-newsletter/756561/openai-employees-bonus-sam-altman-ai-talent-warshttps://archive.is/20250808224658/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-07/tesla-disbands-dojo-supercomputer-team-in-blow-to-ai-efforthttps://fortune.com/2025/08/04/billionaire-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-ai-staffers-poaching-meta-mark-zuckerberg-100k-six-figure-salaries-openai-sam-altman/https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e02vx55wpohttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/business/dealbook/meta-microsoft-ai-spending-shares.htmlhttps://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-meta-billion-dollars-ai-poaching-failed/ This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about surge pricing, Walmart, and the Robinson-Patman Act.We also discuss personal data, AC settings, and Delta’s earnings call.Recommended Book: How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared RubinTranscriptThe US Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 is also called the Anti-Price Discrimination Act, and it was passed to make it illegal for a product supplier to charge different prices to different customers.So a company that makes candy bars wouldn’t be allowed to charge one price to most of their customers, all the smaller and mid-sized convenience stores and mom-and-pop grocery stores, for instance, and then a lower price to the big stores, the Walmarts and Amazons of the world.The concern was that these larger players, which at the time this law was passed were burgeoning grocery stores like A&P, would be able to achieve a monopolistic position in the market for these goods, these slightly lower prices giving them one more advantage over their smaller competitors.During the four decades or so of this Act’s enforcement, small grocery stores has prices that were, on average, about 1% higher than those offered by their large competitors, and the eight largest grocery store chains only captured about 25% of all grocery sales in the US—essentially every city and town of any size had at least one small grocery store, and most had several of them, during this period. It was a very competitive market.During the Reagan administration in the 80s, though, enforcement was abandoned, as the folks in charge of that enforcement were convinced this Act was holding back growth; they saw it as a handout to small businesses at the expense of big business, so while it technically remained on the books, they just stopped enforcing it, and the big businesses in these spaces got the message pretty quickly.Walmart was the first big business to really lean into the new powers afforded them by this fresh governmental stance, and that led to it becoming the country’s largest grocery store chain by 2001, and other big grocery brands, like Kroger and Safeway, began to do the same, consolidating all their buying so they could put in huge orders like Walmart was able to put in, and that allowed them to demand lower prices, which in turn allowed them to dramatically increase profits and gobble up their smaller competition.All of which led to the emergence of food deserts across the country, a term that was coined in 1995 to refer to areas where there are simply no grocery stores within a reasonable distance of relatively large populations of people, because smaller grocery stores can no longer compete, even when they’re the only player in town; folks have to travel to the larger chain stores, and have no real options closer to home, which can result in food precariousness, and situations in which the only nearby food options are unhealthy ones—the snacks at gas stations, for instance.This same general pattern played out across all retail spaces, including pharmacies and bookstores and athletic supply stores, and between 1982 and 2017, the total market share of independent retailers in the US dropped from 53% to 22%.Which in some ways is great at the federal level, as—and this is what the Reagan administration seemed to want, back in the 80s—big businesses can grow a lot faster and bigger than small businesses, and that can lead to outsized GDP numbers, and other such macro-scale figures.Unfortunately, while independent retailers tend to keep nearly half of the revenue they pull in within their local community, major chains only keep something like 14% in the local community—so the shift from independent to chain retailers has had a deleterious impact on communities across the US, in the sense of having less competition, having food and other sorts of product deserts, and in terms of tax revenues and overall economic wealth being sapped from these areas and moved to other places, creating some relatively few winners and a whole lot of losers, in the process.What I’d like to talk about today is another type of variable pricing, this one more directly aimed at consumers, and enabled, at least in its modern incarnation, by big data and the devices we use every day.—Dynamic pricing refers to changing the price of goods or services based on all sorts of variables.Demand or surge pricing, for instance, might see the price of a bus ticket or rideshare ride with Uber cost more during rush-hour, the idea being that there are only so many bus seats and only so many available rideshare rides to go around, and when everyone’s either trying to get to work or get home from work, there will be a lot more people wanting these finite number of seats and rides than there are seats and rides available.Upping the prices, then, is a means of determining who wants these things the most, because they’re willing to pay at times massively inflated prices for something that would cost far less in an hour or two, once the rush has subsided.Similar price-inflation occurs during peak energy-use periods, and energy companies usually explain this price-bump by suggesting that it encourages their customers to use more energy when it’s abundant and cheap, and to use less of it when it’s scarce and expensive.On very hot days when everyone is using their air conditioners to stay cool, then, inflated energy prices might encourage them to be less aggressive with their AC settings, keeping their indoor temperatures at a more reasonable level, which in turn ensures there’s more energy available for everyone and less risk of brownouts or blackouts.This pricing strategy is often seen by those on the receiving end of such price-bumps, as price gouging, which refers to companies taking advantage of temporary variables to massively inflate their prices, at times to abusive levels that they can justify by pointing at those variables and a desire to moderate supply and demand.So if there’s a big convention in town, local hotels can argue that they’re doubling or tripling their prices because there are not enough rooms for everyone who wants rooms on those days, but this could also be construed as a money-grab, these hotel companies knowing that some people won’t be able to avoid paying for a place to stay during the convention they have to attend, so they’re taking advantage of customers who have no choice but to pay up.We saw similar dynamics play out globally during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when folks who had high-quality masks on hand were able to charge incredible sums for those masks because production hadn’t yet scaled up, so they were relatively scarce and thus precious, and these people and companies with the right product at the right time knew they could get away with charging many times the actual sticker-price of that product, because some people would feel they had no choice but to pay it.Each situation of this kind will feel reasonable and suitable for the supply-demand situation to some, and completely unreasonable and abusive to others, and it’s possible to have a bit of both in many such situations—the companies in question actually want to manage a scarce supply of something, but are also keen to make as much money as possible while doing it.Dynamic pricing has become even more common in online marketplaces like Amazon, where it’s not just holidays or events or the sudden emergence of global pandemics that can impact demand and thus, the prices retailers can get away with charging would-be customers.Amazon has algorithms that keep track of what competitors are charging for the goods they offer, what sort of demand the market is seeing for said goods, what inventory looks like—if they have a lot or very few of something available to sell—and all sorts of other factors that might reasonably impact the price of a product, even a little bit.As of 2024, the price of a product listed on Amazon changes several times a day, in some cases every 10 minutes, and they make about 2.5 million prices changes every single day, adjusting for those aforementioned micro-scale variables, on a product-by-product basis, but also adjusting their entire catalog so that relatively uncommon goods have higher prices, but common goods have lower prices, which means customers shopping around will tend to see Amazon’s lower-priced goods more often than the higher-priced ones, which in turn can adjust their perception of the company and its marketplace in a favorable, lower-price direction.Amazon also has access to just a silly amount of data about their customers, some of it scooped up while we surf their sites, and some bought from other data-aggregators. And this allows Amazon, just like most tech companies and retailers, these days to track our behavior, watching what we click on, how long we linger on different products or product types, noticing our searches and contextualizing all of it with where we live, what we’ve purchased in the past, and so on.The company isn’t very transparent about how it uses all this personal data, but while it’s been been speculated that they might adjust prices based on our individual profiles, most evidence suggests they mostly use it to determine what we’re shown—what products are promoted to us, basically, as opposed to setting prices based on what it thinks we’ll pay, as individuals.The same generally seems to be true of other retailers right now, though there are concerns that this might change at some point in the near-future, as new technologies, some based on AI, enable the more-rapid and sophisticated crunching of data, and the consequent individualization of prices, even in person.US airline Delta, for instance, recently announced that it would be using AI to help it boost profits by charging different customers different prices for the same airline seat.These prices would be based on their customer profile, which means all the data scooped up by Delta from various sources, including things like past purchases, regular flight schedules, and how much money their systems think each customer makes and has available to spend.The president of the company said on a recent earnings call that they’ve been running a pilot project for this approach that resulted in about 3% of ticket sales being sold based on this model over the past 6 months, and by the end of the year, their goal is to increase that to 20% of tickets.In theory, this sort of system could be good for some customers some of the time, because it could drop prices on tickets that customers wouldn’t want to, or wouldn’t be able to pay for, otherwise. If I’m considering a trip, but the tickets are more expensive than I want to pay, these systems could theoretically recognize this and offer them to me at a price they can afford to sell them at, and which I can afford. That could lead to more ticket sales, and thus, higher profits.The evidence on the ground with these sorts of systems usually points at price increases, not decreases, though: the companies using these models to see how much they can get per unit, not using them to sell more units at lower profit margins.In other words, usually it’s wealthier consumers who get the better deals, as these companies want to keep them coming back, spending larger sums of money on glitzier products and services over time, while poorer consumers have fewer options, and will thus tend to pay whatever they’re told they have to pay.Delta spent most of July 2025 trying to control the backlash that erupted following that earnings call, and they’re now saying, to the press but also in formal letters to government watchdogs who expressed concerns about what they said they planned to do, that no no no, we misspoke, we’re not using individualized data to set prices, it’s all good, don’t worry about it.That announcement from Delta came shortly after lawmakers announced they would be pushing to get a new act, the Stop AI Price Gouging and Wage Fixing Act, passed into law, and though some US Senators have said they’ll block such efforts by Delta, other airlines, including Azul, WestJet, Virgin Atlantic, and VivaAerobus are also clients of the Israeli company, Fetcherr, that Delta has been working with to run their AI pricing pilot program—and representatives from Fetcherr have claimed that this pricing model is irresistible to those in charge of these companies, so it will probably take over the airline industry relatively quickly, and they plan to expand into other industries soon.These sorts of pricing models aren’t typically very popular with customers, and efforts by Walmart and other big grocery chains to remove static in-store pricing labels and replace them with digital versions, or in some extreme cases to remove them entirely and rely on apps on customers’ phone to show prices on goods, raised similar alarm bells, as dynamic pricing can allow the store to more rapidly change their prices based on demand, like Uber’s surge pricing model, but maybe applied to flour or cough medicine instead of rideshare seats, and in-app pricing could allow them to show different prices to different people shopping for the same thing at the same time—again, based on income, buying patterns, and so on.Walmart and everyone else dabbling in this space has, like Delta, claimed they intend no such dynamism in their pricing, even as their CEOs in some cases continue to brag to investors about the possibilities. As a result, there seems to be a decent chance we’ll see the large-scale deployment of these sorts of models in at least some customer-facing industries within the next year or two, some company deciding to more fully test the regulatory establishment’s appetite for challenging this push into a new pricing paradigm that would, theoretically at least, allow big companies to earn still-higher profits and grow even larger.Show Noteshttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1HQoQhvfVv8p0XmOdDIiWTnmd2YM_za07/viewhttps://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-price-changes-2018-8https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_pricinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_pricinghttps://www.archeraffiliates.com/post/amazon-dynamic-pricinghttps://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/delta-denies-using-ai-to-come-up-with-inflated-personalized-prices/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/will-ai-end-cheap-flights-critics-attack-deltas-predatory-ai-pricing/https://www.the-sun.com/money/14839597/walmart-kroger-electronic-labels-dynamic-pricing-demand-wendyshttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/business/kroger-walmart-facial-recognition-prices.htmlhttps://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/what-is-dynamic-pricinghttps://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/food-deserts-robinson-patman/680765/https://www.indieretailermonth.com/statisticshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson%E2%80%93Patman_Act This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe