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Colin Wright
Let's Know Things
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  • Creative Assets
    This week we talk about AI chatbots, virtual avatars, and romance novels.We also discuss Inkitt, Galatea, and LLM grooming.Recommended Book: New Cold Wars by David E. SangerTranscriptThere’s evidence that the US Trump administration used AI tools, possibly ChatGPT, possibly another, similar model or models, to generate the numbers they used to justify a recent wave of new tariffs on the country’s allies and enemies.It was also recently reported that Democratic mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo used AI-generated text and citations in a plan he released called Addressing New York’s Housing Crisis. And this case is a bit more of a slam dunk, as whomever put the plan together for him seems to have just copy-pasted snippets from the ChatGPT interface without changing or checking them—which is increasingly common for all of us, as such interfaces are beginning to replace even search engine results, like those provided by Google.But it’s also a practice that’s generally frowned upon, as—and this is noted even in the copy provided alongside many such tools and their results—these systems provide a whole lot of flawed, false, incomplete, or otherwise not-advisable-to-use data, in some cases flubbing numbers or introducing bizarre grammatical inaccuracies, but in other cases making up research or scientific papers that don’t exist, but presenting them the same as they would a real-deal paper or study. And there’s no way to know without actually going and checking what these things serve up, which can, for many people at least, take a long while; so a lot of people don’t do this, including many politicians and their administrations, and that results in publishing made-up, baseless, numbers, and in some cases wholesale fabricated claims.This isn’t great for many reasons, including that it can reinforce our existing biases. If you want to slap a bunch of tariffs on a bunch of trading partners, you can ask an AI to generated some numbers that justify those high tariffs, and it will do what it can to help; it’s the ultimate yes-man, depending on how you word your queries. And it will do this even if your ask is not great or truthful or ideal.These tools can also help users spiral down conspiracy rabbit holes, can cherry-pick real studies to make it seem as if something that isn’t true is true, and it can help folks who are writing books or producing podcasts come up with just-so stories that seem to support a particular, preferred narrative, but which actually don’t—and which maybe aren’t even real or accurate, as presented.What’s more, there’s also evidence that some nation states, including Russia, are engaging in what’s called LLM grooming, which basically means seeding false information to sources they know these models are trained on so that said models will spit out inaccurate information that serves their intended ends.This is similar to flooding social networks with misinformation and bots that seem to be people from the US, or from another country whose elections they hope to influence, that bot apparently a person who supports a particular cause, but in reality that bot is run by someone in Macedonia or within Russia’s own borders. Or maybe changing the Wikipedia entry and hoping no one changes it back.Instead of polluting social networks or Wikis with such misinfo, though, LLM grooming might mean churning out websites with high SEO, search engine optimization rankings, which then pushes them to the top of search results, which in turn makes it more likely they’ll be scraped and rated highly by AI systems that gather some of their data and understanding of the world, if you want to call it that, from these sources.Over time, this can lead to more AI bots parroting Russia’s preferred interpretation, their propaganda, about things like their invasion of Ukraine, and that, in turn, can slowly nudge the public’s perception on such matters; maybe someone who asks ChatGPT about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, after hearing someone who supports Russia claiming that it was all Ukraine’s fault, and they’re told, by ChatGPT, which would seem to be an objective source of such information, being an AI bot, that Ukraine in fact brought it upon themselves, or is in some way actually the aggressor, which would serve Russia’s geopolitical purposes. None of which is true, but it starts to seem more true to some people because of that poisoning of the informational well.So there are some issues of large, geopolitical consequence roiling in the AI space right now. But some of the most impactful issues related to this collection of technologies are somewhat smaller in scale, today, at least, but still have the potential to disrupt entire industries as they scale up.And that’s what I’d like to talk about today, focusing especially on a few recent stories related to AI and its growing influence in creative spaces.—There’s a popular meme that’s been shuffling around social media for a year or two, and a version of it, shared by an author named Joanna Maciejewska (machie-YEF-ski) in a post on X, goes like this: “You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”It could be argued, of course, that we already have technologies that do our laundry and dishes, and that AI has the capacity to make both of those machines more efficient and effective, especially in term of helping manage and moderate increasingly renewables-heavy electrical grids, but the general concept here resonates with a lot of people, I think: why are some of the biggest AI companies seemingly dead-set on replacing creatives, who are already often suffering from financial precarity, but who generally enjoy their work, or at least find it satisfying, instead of automating away the drudgery many of us suffer in the work that pays our bills, in our maintenance of our homes, and in how we get around, work on our health, and so on.Why not automate the tedious and painful stuff rather than the pleasurable stuff, basically?I think, looking at the industry more broadly, you can actually see AI creeping up on all these spaces, painful and pleasurable, but generative AI tools, like ChatGPT and its peers, seem to be especially good at generating text and images and such, in part because it’s optimized for communication, being a chatbot interface over a collection of more complex tools, and most of our entertainments operate in similar spaces; using words, using images, these are all things that overlap with the attributes that make for a useful and convincing chatbot.The AI tools that produce music from scratch, writing the lyrics and producing the melodies and incorporating different instruments, working in different genres, the whole, soup to nuts, are based on similar principles to AI systems that work with large sets of linguistic training data to produce purely language based, written outputs.Feed an AI system gobs of music, and it can learn to produce music at the prompting of a user, then, and the same seems to be true of other types of content, as well, from images to movies to video games.This newfound capacity to spit out works that, for all their flaws, would have previously requires a whole lot of time and effort to produce, is leading to jubilation in some spaces, but concern and even outright terror in others.I did an episode not long ago on so-called ‘vibe coding,’ about people who in some cases can’t code at all, but who are producing entire websites and apps and other products just by learning how to interact with these AI tools appropriately. And these vibe coders are having a field day with these tools.The same is increasingly true of people without any music chops who want to make their own songs. Folks with musical backgrounds often get more out of these tools, same as coders tend to get more from vibe coding, in part because they know what to ask for, and in part because they can edit what they get on the other end, making it better and tweaking the output to make it their own.But people without movie-making skills can also type what they want into a box and have these tools spit out a serviceable movie on the other end, and that’s leading to a change similar to what happened when less-fiddly guns were introduced to the battlefield: you no longer needed to have super well-trained soldiers to defeat your enemies, you could just hand them a gun and teach them to shoot and reload it, and you’d do pretty well; you could even defeat some of your contemporaries who had much better trained and more experienced soldiers, but who hadn’t yet made the jump to gunpowder weapons.There are many aspects to this story, and many gray areas that are not as black and white as, for instance, a non-coder suddenly being able to out-code someone who’s worked really hard to become a decent coder, or someone who knows nothing about making music creating bops, with the aide of these tools, that rival those of actual musicians and singers who have worked their whole life to be able to the same.There have been stories about actors selling their likenesses to studios and companies that work with studios, for instance, those likenesses then being used by clients of those companies, often without the actors’ permission.For some, this might be a pretty good deal, as that actor is still free to pursue the work they want to do, and their likeness can be used in the background for a fee, some of that fee going to the actor, no additional work necessary. Their likeness becomes an asset that they wouldn’t have otherwise had—not to be used and rented out in that capacity, at least—and thus, for some, this might be a welcome development.This has, in some cases though, resulted in situations in which said actor discovers that their likeness is being used to hawk products they would never be involved with, like online scams and bogus health cures. They still receive a payment for that use of their image, but they realize that they have little or no control over how and when and for what purposes it’s used.And because of the aforementioned financial precarity that many creatives in particular experience as a result of how their industries work, a lot of people, actors and otherwise, would probably jump at the chance to make some money, even if the terms are abusive and, long-term, not in their best interest.Similar tools, and similar financial arrangements, are being used and made in the publishing world.An author named Manjari Sharma wrote her first book, an enemies-to-lovers style romance, in a series of installments she published on the free fanfic platform Wattpad during the height of the Covid pandemic. She added it to another, similar platform, Inkitt, once it was finished, and it garnered a lot of attention and praise on both.As a result of all that attention, the folks behind Inkitt suggested she move it from their free platform to their premium offering, Galatea, which would allow Sharma to earn a portion of the money gleaned from her work.The platform told her they wanted to turn the book into a series in early 2024, but that she would only have a few weeks to complete the next book, if she accepted their terms. She was busy with work, so she accepted their offer to hire a ghostwriter to produce the sequel, as they told her she’d still receive a cut of the profits, and the fan response to that sequel was…muted. They didn’t like it. Said it had a different vibe, wasn’t well-written, just wasn’t very good. Lacked the magic of the original, basically.She was earning extra money from the sequel, then, but no one really enjoyed it, and she didn’t feel great about that. Galatea then told Sharma that they would make a video series based on the books for their new video app, 49 episodes, each a few minutes long, and again, they’d handle everything, she’d just collect royalties.The royalty money she was earning was a lot less than what traditional publishers offer, but it was enough that she was earning more from those royalties than from her actual bank job, and the company, due to the original deal she made when she posted the book to their service, had the right to do basically anything they wanted with it, so she was kind of stuck, either way.So she knew she had to go along with whatever they wanted to do, and was mostly just trying to benefit from that imbalance where possible. What she didn’t realize, though, was that the company was using AI tools to, according to the company’s CEO, “iterate on the stories,” which basically means using AI to produce sequels and video content for successful, human-written books. As a result of this approach, they have just one head of editorial and five “story intelligence analysts” on staff, alongside some freelancers, handling books and supplementary content written by about 400 authors.As a business model, it’s hard to compete with this approach.As a customer, at the moment, at least, with today’s tools and our approach to using them, it’s often less than ideal. Some AI chatbots are helpful, but many of them just gatekeep so a company can hire fewer customer service humans, saving the business money at the customer’s expense. That seems to be the case with this book’s sequel, too, and many of the people paying to read these things assumed they were written by humans, only to find, after the fact, that they were very mediocre AI-generated knock-offs.There’s a lot of money flooding into this space predicated in part on the promise of being able to replace currently quite expensive people, like those who have to be hired and those who own intellectual property, like the rights to books and the ideas and characters they contain, with near-free versions of the same, the AI doing similar-enough work alongside a human skeleton crew, and that model promises crazy profits by earning the same level of revenue but with dramatically reduced expenses.The degree to which this will actually pan out is still an open question, as, even putting aside the moral and economic quandary of what all these replaced creatives will do, and the legal argument that these AI companies are making right now, that they can just vacuum up all existing content and spit it back out in different arrangements without that being a copyright violation, even setting all of that aside, the quality differential is pretty real, in some spaces right now, and while AI tools do seem to have a lot of promise for all sorts of things, there’s also a chance that the eventual costs of operating them and building out the necessary infrastructure will fail to afford those promised financial benefits, at least in the short term.Show Noteshttps://www.theverge.com/news/648036/intouch-ai-phone-calls-parentshttps://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/04/regrets-actors-who-sold-ai-avatars-stuck-in-black-mirror-esque-dystopia/https://archive.ph/gzfVChttps://archive.ph/91bJbhttps://www.cnn.com/2025/03/08/tech/hollywood-celebrity-deepfakes-congress-law/index.htmlhttps://www.npr.org/2024/12/21/nx-s1-5220301/deepfakes-memes-artificial-intelligence-electionshttps://techcrunch.com/2025/04/13/jack-dorsey-and-elon-musk-would-like-to-delete-all-ip-law/https://www.404media.co/this-college-protester-isnt-real-its-an-ai-powered-undercover-bot-for-cops/https://hellgatenyc.com/andrew-cuomo-chatgpt-housing-plan/https://www.theverge.com/news/642620/trump-tariffs-formula-ai-chatgpt-gemini-claude-grokhttps://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-cant-predict-the-impact-of-tariffsbut-it-will-try-e387e40chttps://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/04/17/llm-poisoning-grooming-chatbots-russia/ 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
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  • Money Mules and Matchmakers
    This week we talk about smishing, Huione, and scams.We also discuss money laundering, the Cambodian government, and Tether.Recommended Book: The Longevity Imperative by Andrew J. ScottTranscriptThe portmanteau ‘smishing’ combines SMS and phishing to refer to the practice of using text messages to trick the recipients of said messages into revealing information that allows scammers to access their victim’s accounts on various platforms.One common variation of smishing, which I’ve seen a lot recently, personally, are messages purportedly from toll road operators that tell the recipient they’ve got an unpaid toll, and they need to follow a link that’s provided in order to pay it. If the person receiving that message follows the instructions, they’ll tend to land on a webpage that’s convincing enough, which looks like the sort of site you might go to if you’re paying that kind of toll, online, and you enter your payment information and are then either immediately charged for this fake toll, or that information is used in some more cohesive manner—maybe the card is stolen, maybe it’s added to a larger collection of data they have on you which is then leveraged for a larger payout.This type of scam has become more common in recent years because of innovations deployed by what security researchers have called the Smishing Triad, which is a trio of mobile phishing groups operating out of China that seem to have refined their infrastructure and techniques so that messages they send via iMessage to iPhone users and RCS to Android users can bypass mobile phone networks and enjoy a nearly 100% delivery rate—which makes the name a little ironic, since these groups don’t use SMS to deliver these scam texts anymore, as those other methods of delivery are more reliable for such messages, these days.The big innovation introduced by these groups, though, beyond that deliverability, is the productization of mobile phishing, which basically means they’ve packaged up applications that allow their customers, which are usually smaller-time phishing groups and individuals, to share links to convincing-looking copies of Paypal, Mastercard, Stripe, and CitiGroup payment sites, among others, including individual banks, and that makes knee-jerk payments from the victims receiving these texts more likely, and less likely to set of alarm bells in the minds those receiving them, because they look like just normal payment sites.These pre-packaged scam assets also include regularly rotated web domains, which makes them less likely to trigger the recipient’s anti-scam software—their browser will be less likely to flag them as problematic, basically. And the Triad has hundreds of actual humans working desk jobs, worldwide, supporting their customer base, which again is a bunch of scammers that use this package of tools to try to steal money from their marks.All of this is enabled, in part, by clever emulation software that allows Triad customers to leverage legit and legit-seeming phone numbers from a computer or phone, those devices then sending out around 100 messages per second, per device, to phone numbers in the targeted region. They’re able to do this on a budget because of the efficiency of the software acquired from the Smishing Triad, and the Triad stays just ahead of regulators and law enforcement by rapidly iterating their offerings, which in turn does the same for all of their customers—which grants the benefits of a larger institution to all these individual and smaller scam groups.What I’d like to talk about today is another alleged backend for scammers, this one this more overt and public facing, and perhaps even more impactful because of its size and because of the nature of its offerings.—The Huione (hu-WAY-wahn) Group is a financial conglomerate primarily based in Cambodia, though it also has satellite offices in other countries, mostly in Southeast Asia.Folks use the entity’s QR codes to pay for stuff all around Cambodia, from restaurant tabs to hotel bills to supermarket tallies, and it offers normal banking stuff like checking and savings accounts, alongside things like escrow services and a cryptocurrency exchange.This is a company that buys billboards along major highways throughout the country and which has well-connected people in charge, including one of the Cambodian prime minister’s cousins, who is the director of a Huione company.In addition to its many legitimate offerings, though, Huione has also been accused to providing a range of gray and blackmarket products and services to folks who are doing skeevy but partially legal things, alongside wholly criminal enterprises, like a human trafficking outfit in Myanmar and folks running large smishing schemes in other parts of Southeast Asia.Huione’s primary offering for the criminal underworld though, is allegedly serving as a money laundering go-between.If you run a smishing scammer network, or a group that kidnaps people and sell them into various types of modern slavery in Myanmar, you may have trouble using the money you earn for these efforts because they’re off-book, blackmarket sorts of income. You need to clean, to launder that money to make it seem legitimate, so that you can put it in banks or otherwise use it to pay for things like you would with normal, non-illegally earned money.Money laundering matchmaker services maintain networks of what are called money mules, and these mules are sometimes individuals, and they’re sometimes shell companies with bank accounts or their own cryptocurrency wallets.If you’re scamming people out of their money, you might use this type of service to connect you with a money mule, and you provide that mule’s bank or crypto account information to your victim—so when you receive a scammy text message and follow it to completing, the bank your money is sent to will probably be that of a mule, not the person or group doing the scamming.So the victim transfers their money to that mule’s account, and the mule then moves said money from one account to another to another to another to another, eventually converting it into an asset like a cryptocurrency, once the path has been suitably muddled. They take their cut, which is often something like 15%, somewhere along the way, and you, their customer, the scammer, are handed neutralized, clean resources in the form of that cryptocurrency—which you can then convert into real money at some point—on the other end.An entity like Huione makes money by connecting scammers and other criminals with mules, but also by serving as a guarantor on these transactions.So this entity allegedly, via a network of Telegram channels it maintains, telegram being an anonymizing chat app similar to WhatsApp, it allows matchmakers to advertise on these channels, using thinly veiled language to promote their services, and Huione is able to make money selling ads to mules and other matchmakers who want to promote via these highly trafficked channels, one of which has more than 400,000 users—and they have many of these things, and that alone apparently brings in a fair bit of revenue, serving as a sort of hard-to-track Craigslist for this component of the scam economy.The guarantor component of this digital bazaar means that Huione holds the transactions between scammer and mules in escrow, just like any other escrow service: they take the money and hold it until the service has been completed, at which point they release it, taking a small cut for the service of ensuring that no one gets ripped off—except for the original victim of the scam, of course.The majority of these transactions are completed using Tether, which is a stablecoin that tries to peg its value to the US dollar, each token worth exactly one USD, rather than fluctuating like speculative crypto assets, like Bitcoin, and this allows everyone involved to maintain a veil of both feigned ignorance and anonymity, making it difficult to track who does what, how much money changes hands, and who gets paid and does the paying.This setup allows Huione to claim ignorance any time someone accuses them of doing illegal stuff: after all, they can’t possibly be responsible for what all the entities using their services are up to, right? All everything is just muddled and anonymized enough to grant seeming truthfulness to that claim of ignorance.Because of how all this is set up, most of what we know about this is the result of whistleblowing from insiders and leaked documents, alongside divulgences from security researchers who know how to get into these sorts of networks and who at times hack those involved in various ways.And it seems, based on those divulgences and other gleaned knowledge, that Huione’s money laundering services, alone, have been linked to nearly $27 billion in cryptocurrency transactions since 2021—though that could be a significant undercount because of the blurry nature of this industry and the entities involved with it.Thus far, Huione has never been targeted for sanctions by any government.Tether took action to freeze some of its accounts after law enforcement officials flagged them for criminal behavior, and Telegram has closed some of those illicit, matchmaking channels, but it’s easy enough to set up new versions of both, while the escrow subsidiary of Huione, previously called Huione Guarantee, denies any connection to these activities and even changed its name to Haowang Guarantee in October of 2024, though that denial seems to be public-facing only: the escrow-providing company continues to claim that the larger Huione Group is one of its strategic partners and shareholders.Huione also has its own matchmatching service, called Huione International Pay, which operates as a real-deal bank, but also does what all the other matchmakers do—it helps criminal enterprises shuffle their money around, taking a fee to provide them with clean money, usually in the shape of Tether crypto tokens, on the other end.Though notably, Huione also recently launched their own stablecoin called USDH, alongside an in-house communication service called ChatMe and an array of mini-games that seem optimized for automation, which is another means of laundering money via what seems like gambling apps, allowing their clients to cut out the casinos that are sometimes used as part of the laundering process. All of which seems primed to internalize more of this process, slowly doing away with the need for Telegram and Tether and those casinos, which would seem to remove some of the risk associated with those external, uncontrolled-by-Huione, platforms.Despite all this, this enterprise has been allowed to flourish and grow like it has, according to a threat analyst with the UN, at least, because of lax enforcement in Cambodia, and the conglomerate’s connections with the government and ability to say, basically, we’re legit, look, we’re just a bank, we can’t control what other people might do with our services. Their whole setup is obscure enough, too, that anyone who takes a close look at their entangled business structure quickly gets lost in its complexity and many tangles and dead-ends.Some governments, including the Chinese government, have been cracking down on entities like Huione operating within their borders, but many such crackdowns are hobbled when they’re aimed at operations based in different countries, especially those with lax enforcement, like Cambodia.Also worth noting is that if someone’s going to get caught, it’ll most likely be the mules, not the matchmakers or scammers, and that’s by design. It’s a bit like street-level drug dealers being more likely to be picked up by police than the folks running the larger drug enterprise of which they’re a part. Huione and other entities like it are largely insulated from major consequences, even if the mules who use their services periodically get caught in dragnets cast by law enforcement.That said, the National Bank of Cambodia recently announced that it hasn’t renewed Huione’s license to operate its payment service in the country, the one that runs all those QR codes, because it didn’t meet renewal requirements. That happened in late-March of 2025, so pretty recently, though the company has already said that it will register its business in Japan and Canada, so it seems to be looking for a suitable plot of land on which to rebuild this component of its setup.Many security researchers and law enforcement officials have warned that the time to crack down on Huione and similar conglomerates is now, because they’re currently reliant on partially exposed third-parties like Telegram and Tether. Once they successfully move those activities inward, they’ll be a lot more difficult to track, but also nearly impossible to shutter, unless there’s a significant change in the government and enforcement climate in the countries in which they’re based, which at this point at least, looks unlikely.Show Noteshttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/world/asia/cambodia-money-laundering-huione.htmlhttps://www.wired.com/story/the-largest-illicit-online-marketplace-ever-is-growing-at-an-alarming-rate/https://www.wired.com/story/pig-butchering-scam-crypto-huione-guarantee/https://www.wired.com/story/interpol-pig-butchering-scams-rename/https://www.propublica.org/article/casinos-cambodia-myanmar-laos-southeast-asia-fraud-cybercrimehttps://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/china-based-sms-phishing-triad-pivots-to-banks/#more-70793https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_spam 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
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  • Trump's Tariffs
    This week we talk about taxes, reciprocity, and recession.We also discuss falling indices, stagflation, and theories of operation.Recommended Book: The Serviceberry by Robin Wall KimmererTranscriptStagflation, which is a portmanteau of stagnation and inflation, is exactly what it sounds like: a combination of those two elements, usually with high levels of unemployment, as well, that can cause a prolonged period of economic sluggishness and strain that slows growth and can even lead to a recession.The term was coined in the UK in the 1960s to describe issues they were facing at the time, but it was globally popularized by the oil shocks of the 1970s, which sparked a period of high prices and slow growth in many countries, including in the US, where inflation boomed, productivity floundered, and economic growth plateaud, leading to a stock market crash in 1973 and 1974.Inflation, unto itself, can be troubling, as it means prices are going up faster than incomes, so the money people earn and have saved is worth less and less each day. That leads to a bunch of negative knock-on effects, which is a big part of why the US Fed has kept interest rates so high, aiming to trim inflation rates back to their preferred level of about 2% as quickly as possible in the wake of inflation surges following the height of the Covid pandemic.Stagnant economic growth is also troubling, as it means lowered GDP, reduced future outlook for an economy, and that also tends to mean less investment in said economy, reduced employment levels—and likely even lower employment levels in the future—and an overall sense of malaise that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, no one feeling particularly upbeat about where their country is going; and that’s not great economically, but it can also lead to all sorts of social issues, as people with nothing to look forward to but worse and worse outcomes are more likely to commit crimes or stoke revolutions than their upbeat, optimistic, comfortable kin.The combination of these two elements is more dastardly than just the sum of their two values implies, though, as measures that government agencies might take to curb inflation, like raising interest rates and overall tightening monetary policy, reduces business investment which can lead to unemployment. On the flip-side, though, things a government might do to reduce unemployment, like injecting more money into the economy, tends to spike inflation.It’s a lose-lose situation, basically, and that’s why government agencies tasked with keeping things moving along steadily go far out of their way to avoid stagflation; it’s not easily addressed, and it only really goes away with time, and sometimes a very long time.There are two primary variables that have historically led to stagflation: supply shocks and government policies that reduce output and increase the money supply too rapidly.The stagflation many countries experienced in the 1970s was the result of Middle Eastern oil producing nations cutting off the flow of oil to countries that supported Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, though a sharp increase in money supply and the end of the Bretton Woods money management system, which caused exchange rate issues between global currencies, also contributed, and perhaps even more so than the oil shock.What I’d like to talk about today is another major variable, the implementation of a huge package of new tariffs on pretty much everyone by the US, that many economists are saying could lead to a new period of stagflation, alongside other, more immediate consequences.—A tariff is a type of tax that’s imposed on imported goods, usually targeting specific types of goods, or goods from a particular place.Way back in the day these were an important means of funding governments: the US government actually made most of its revenue, about 90% of it, from tariffs before 1863, because there just wasn’t a whole of lot other ways for the young country to make money at the time.Following the War of 1812, the US government attempted to double tariffs, but that depleted international trade, which led to less income, not more—gross imports dropped by 71%, and the government scrambled to implement direct and excise taxes, the former of which is the tax a person or business pays that isn’t based on transactions, while the latter is a duty that’s paid upon the manufacture of something, as opposed to when it’s sold.Tariffs resurfaced in the following decades, but accounted for less and less of the government’s income as the country’s manufacturing base increased, and excise and income taxes made up 63% of the US’s federal revenue by 1865.Tax sources have changes a lot over the years, and they vary somewhat from country to country.But the dominant move in the 20th century, especially post-WWII, has been toward free trade, which usually means no or low tariffs on goods being made in one place and sold in another, in part because this tends to lead to more wealth for everyone, on average, at least.This refocus toward globalized free trade resulted in a lot of positives, like being able to specialize and make things where they’re cheap and sell them where they’re precious, but also some negatives, like the offshoring of jobs—though even those negatives, which sucked for the people who lost their jobs, have been positive for some, as the companies who offshored the jobs did so because it saved them money, the folks who were hired were generally paid more than was possible in their region, previously, and the people consuming the resulting goods were able to get them cheaper than would otherwise be feasible.It’s been a mixed bag, then, but the general consensus among economists is that open trade is good because it incentivizes competition and productivity. Governments are less likely to implement protectionist policies to preserve badly performing local business entities from better performing foreign versions of the same, and that means less wasted effort and resources, more options for everyone, and more efficient overall economic operation, which contributes to global flourishing. And not for nothing, nations that trade with each other tend to be less likely to go to war with each other.Now that’s a massively simplified version of the argument, but again, that’s been the outline for how things are meant to work, and aside from some obvious exceptions—like China’s protection of its local tech sector from foreign competition, and the US’s protection of its aviation and car industries—it’s generally worked as intended, and the world has become massively wealthier during this period compared to before this state of affairs was broadly implemented, post-WWII; there’s simply no comparison, the difference is stark.There are renewed concerns about stagflation in the United States, however, because of a big announcement made by US President Trump on April 2, 2025, that slapped substantial and at times simply massive new tariffs on just about everyone, including the country’s longest-term allies and most valuable trading partners.On what the president called “Liberation Day,” he announced two new types of tariff: one is a universal 10% import duty on all goods brought into the US, and another that he called a reciprocal tariff on imports from scores of countries, including 15 that will be hit especially hard—a list that includes China, EU nations, Canada, and Japan, among others.The theory of these so-called reciprocal tariffs is that Trump thinks the US is being taken advantage of, as, to use one example that he cited, the US charges a 2.5% tariff on imported cars, while the EU charges a 10% tariff on American cars imported to their union.The primary criticism of this approach, which has been cited by most economists and entities like the World Trade Organization, is that the numbers the US administration apparently used to make this list don’t really add up, and seem to include some made-up measures of trade deficits, which some analysts suspect were calculated by AI tools like ChatGPT, as the same incorrect measures are spat out by commonly use chatbots like ChatGPT when they’re asked about how to balance these sorts of things. But the important takeaway, however they arrived at these numbers, is that the comparisons used aren’t really sensical when you look at the details.Some countries simply can’t afford American exports, for instance, while others have no use for them. The idea that a country that can’t afford American goods should have astoundingly large tariffs applied to their exports to the US is questionable from the get-go, but it also means the goods they produce, which might be valuable and important for Americans, be they raw materials like food or manufactured goods like car parts, will become more expensive for Americans, either because those Americans have to pay a higher price necessitated by the tax, or because the lower-price supplier is forced out of the market and replaced by a higher-price alternative.In short, the implied balance of these tariffs don’t line up with reality, according to essentially everyone except folks working within Trump’s administration, and the question then is what the actual motivation behind them might be.The Occam’s Razor answer is that Trump and/or people in his administration simply don’t understand tariffs and global economics well enough to understand that their theory on the matter is wrong. And many foreign leaders have said these tariffs are not in any way reciprocal, and that the calculation used to draw them up was, in the words of Germany’s economic minister, “nonsense.” That’s the general consensus of learned people, and the only folks who seem to be saying otherwise are the one’s responsible for drawing these tariffs up, and defending them in the press.Things have been pretty stellar for most of the global economy since free trade became the go-to setup for imports and exports, but this administration is acting as if the opposite is true. That might be a feigned misunderstanding, or it might be genuine; they might truly not understand the difference between how things have been post-WWII and how they were back in the 1800s when tariffs were the go-to method of earning government revenue.But in either case, Trump is promising that rewiring the global order, the nature of default international trade in this way, will be good for Americans because rather than serving as a linchpin for that global setup, keeping things orderly by serving as the biggest market in the world, the American economy will be a behemoth that gets what it’s owed, even if at the expense of others—a winner among losers who keep playing because they can’t afford not to, rather than a possibly slightly less winning winner amongst other winners.This theory seems to have stemmed from a 1980s understanding of things, which is a cultural and economic milieu from which a lot of Trump’s views and ideas seem to have originated, despite in many cases having long since been disproved or shown to be incomplete. But it’s also a premise that may be more appealing to very wealthy people, because a lot of the negative consequences from these tariffs will be experienced by people in lower economic classes and people from poorer nations, where the price hikes will be excruciating, and folks in the middle class, whose wealth is primarily kept in stocks. Folks in the higher economic echolons, including those making most of these decisions, tend to make and build their wealth via other means, which won’t be entirely unimpacted, but will certainly be less hurt by these moves than everyone else.It’s also possible, and this seems more likely to me, but it’s of course impossible to know the truth of the matter right now, that Trump is implementing a huge version of his go-to negotiating tactic of basically hurting the folks on the other end of a negotiation in order to establish leverage over them, and then starting that negotiation by asking what they’ll do for him if he limits or stops the pain.The US is expected to suffer greatly from these tariffs, but other countries, especially those that rely heavily on the US market as their consumer base, and in some cases for a huge chunk of their economy, their total GDP, will suffer even more.There’s a good chance many countries, in public or behind closed doors, will look at the numbers and decide that it makes more sense to give Trump and his administration something big, up front, in exchange for a lessening of these tariffs. That’s what seems to be happening with Vietnam, already, and Israel, and there’s a good chance other nations have already put out feelers to see what he might want in exchange for some preferential treatment in this regard—early reports suggest at least 50 governments have done exactly that since the announcement, though those reports are coming from within the White House, so it’s probably prudent to take them with a grain of salt, at this point. That said, this sort of messaging from the White House suggests that the administration might be hoping for a bunch of US-favoring deals and will therefore make a lot of noise about initial negotiations to signal that that’s what they want, and that the pain can go away if everyone just kowtows a little and gestures at some new trade policies that favor the US and make Trump look like a master negotiator who’s bringing the world to heel.There’s been pushback against this potentiality, however, led by China, which has led with its own, very large counter-tariffs rather than negotiating, and the EU looks like it might do the same. If enough governments do this, it could call Trump’s bluff while also making these other entities, perhaps especially China, which was first out the door with counter-tariffs and statements about not be cowed by the US’s bluster, seem like the natural successors to the US in terms of global economic leadership. It could result in the US giving away all that soft power, basically, and that in turn could realign global trade relationships and ultimately other sorts of relationships, too, in China’s favor.One other commonly cited possibility, and this is maybe the grimmest of the three, but it’s not impossible, is that Trump and other people in his administration recognize that the world is changing, that China is ascendent and the US is by some metrics not competing in the way it needs to in order to keep up and retain its dominance, and that’s true in terms of things like manufacturing and research, but also the potential implications of AI, changing battlefield tactics, and so on. And from that perspective, it maybe makes sense to just shake the game board, knocking over all the pieces rather than trying to win by adhering to what have become common conventions and normal rules of play.If everyone takes a hit, if there’s a global recession or depression and everything is knocked asunder because those variables that led to where we are today, with all their associated pros and cons, are suddenly gone, that might lead to a situation in which the US is hurt, but not as badly as everyone else, including entities like China. And because the US did the game board shaking, the US may thus be in a better position as everything settles back into a new state of affairs; a new state of affairs that Trump and his people want to be more favorable to the US, long-term.There’s some logic to this thinking, even if it’s a very grim, me-first, zero-sum kind of logic. The US economy is less reliant on global trade than the rest of the G20, the wealthiest countries in the world; only about 25% of its GDP is derived from trade, while that number is 37% for China, 63% for France, and a whopping 88% for Germany.Other nations are in a relatively more vulnerable position than the US in a less-open, more tariff-heavy world, then, and that means the US administration may have them over a barrel, making the aforementioned US-favoring negotiations more likely, but also, again, potentially just hurting everyone, but the US less so. And when I say hurting, I mean some countries losing a huge chunk of their economy overnight, triggering a lot more poverty, maybe stagflation and famines, and possibly even revolutions, as people worldwide experience a shocking and sudden decrease in both wealth and future economic outlook.Already, just days after Trump announced his tariffs, global markets are crashing, with US markets on track to record its second-worst three-day decline in history, after only the crash of 1987—so that’s worse than even the crashes that followed 9/11, the Covid-19 pandemic, the debt crisis, and many others.Foreign markets are doing even worse, though, with Hong Kong’s recently high-flying Hang Seng falling 13% in trading early this week, and Japan’s Nikkei dropping 8%.Other market markers are also dropping, the price of oil falling to a pandemic-era level of $60 per barrel, Bitcoin losing 10% in a day, and even the US dollar, which theoretically should rise in a tariff scenario, dropping 0.1%—which suggests investors are planning for a damaging recession, and the US market and currency as a whole might be toxic for a while; which could, in turn, lead to a boom for the rest of the world, the US missing out on that boom.There are also simpler theories, I should mention, that tariffs may be meant to generate more profits to help pay for Trump’s expanded tax cuts without requiring he touch the third-rails of Medicare or Social Security, or that they’re meant to address the US’s booming debt by causing investors to flee to Treasury bills, which has the knock-on effect of reducing the interest rates that have to be paid on government debt.That flight toward Treasuries is already happening, though it seems to be primarily because investors are fleeing the market as stocks collapse in value and everyone’s worrying about their future, about stagflation, and about mass layoffs and unemployment.It may be that all or most of these things are true, too, by the way, and that this jumble of events, pros and cons alike, are seen as a net-positive by this administration.For what it’s worth, too, the US Presidency doesn’t typically get to set things like tariffs—that’s congress’ responsibility and right. But because Congress is currently controlled by Republicans, they’ve yet to push back on these tariffs with a veto, and they may not. There are rumblings within the president’s party about this, and a lot of statements about how it’ll ultimately be good, but that maybe they would have done things differently, but there hasn’t been any real action yet, just hedging. And that could remain the case, but if things get bad enough, they could be forced by their constituents to take concrete action on the matter before Trump’s promised, theoretical positive outcomes have the chance to emerge, or not.Show Noteshttps://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20060925_RL33665_4a8c6781ce519caa3e6b82f95c269f73021c5fdf.pdfhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/03/31/tariffs-affect-consumer-spending/https://www.wsj.com/tech/exempt-or-not-the-chip-industry-wont-escape-tariffs-a6c771dbhttps://www.wsj.com/economy/central-banking/goldman-sachs-lifts-u-s-recession-probability-to-35-ce285ebchttps://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am-9d85eb00-1184-11f0-8b11-0da1ebc288e3.htmlhttps://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-democrats-economy-protests-financial-markets-90afa4079acbde1deb223adf070c1e98https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/trade-war-explodes-across-world-at-pace-not-seen-in-decades-0b6d6513https://www.mufgamericas.com/sites/default/files/document/2025-04/The-Long-Shadow-of-William-McKinley.pdfhttps://x.com/krishnanrohit/status/1907587352157106292https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/business/trump-stocks-tariffs-trade.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/opinion/trump-tariffs-theories.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/world/asia/vietnam-trump-tariff-delay.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/world/europe/trade-trump-tariffs-brexit.htmlhttps://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/04/why-do-domestic-prices-rise-with-tarriffs.htmlhttps://www.foxnews.com/politics/how-we-got-liberation-day-look-trumps-past-comments-tariffshttps://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trumps-tariff-strategy-can-be-traced-back-to-the-1980s/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/us/politics/trump-tv-stock-market.htmlhttps://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/research/638199_A_Users_Guide_to_Restructuring_the_Global_Trading_System.pdfhttps://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/over-50-countries-push-for-tariff-revisions-will-donald-trump-compromise-heres-what-the-white-house-said/articleshow/120043664.cmshttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/business/stock-market-plunge-investment-bank-impact.htmlhttps://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-trump-tariffs-trade-war-04-07-25https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-trump-tariff-foreign-policy-6934e493https://www.wsj.com/economy/in-matter-of-days-outlook-shifts-from-solid-growth-to-recession-risk-027eb2b4https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Asia-Pacific-stocks-sink-from-Trump-s-tariff-barrage-Hong-Kong-down-13https://www.reuters.com/markets/eu-seeks-unity-first-strike-back-trump-tariffs-2025-04-06/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/07/trump-presidency-news-tariffs/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/world/asia/china-trade-war-tariffs.htmlhttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-04-07/global-rout-carries-whiff-of-panic-as-trump-holds-fast-on-tariffshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflationhttps://finance.yahoo.com/news/economists-fed-recent-projections-signal-120900777.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_stagnation 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
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  • Vibe Coding
    This week we talk about Studio Ghibli, Andrej Karpathy, and OpenAI.We also discuss code abstraction, economic repercussions, and DOGE.Recommended Book: How To Know a Person by David BrooksTranscriptIn late-November of 2022, OpenAI released a demo version of a product they didn’t think would have much potential, because it was kind of buggy and not very impressive compared to the other things they were working on at the time. This product was a chatbot interface for a generative AI model they had been refining, called ChatGPT.This was basically just a chatbot that users could interact with, as if they were texting another human being. And the results were good enough—both in the sense that the bot seemed kinda sorta human-like, but also in the sense that the bot could generate convincing-seeming text on all sorts of subjects—that people went absolutely gaga over it, and the company went full-bore on this category of products, dropping an enterprise version in August the following year, a search engine powered by the same general model in October of 2024, and by 2025, upgraded versions of their core models were widely available, alongside paid, enhanced tiers for those who wanted higher-level processing behind the scenes: that upgraded version basically tapping a model with more feedstock, a larger training library and more intensive and refined training, but also, in some cases, a model that thinks longer, than can reach out and use the internet to research stuff it doesn’t already know, and increasingly, to produce other media, like images and videos.During that time, this industry has absolutely exploded, and while OpenAI is generally considered to be one of the top dogs in this space, still, they’ve got enthusiastic and well-funded competition from pretty much everyone in the big tech world, like Google and Amazon and Meta, while also facing upstart competitors like Anthropic and Perplexity, alongside burgeoning Chinese competitors, like Deepseek, and established Chinese tech giants like Tencent and Baidu.It’s been somewhat boggling watching this space develop, as while there’s a chance some of the valuations of AI-oriented companies are overblown, potentially leading to a correction or the popping of a valuation bubble at some point in the next few years, the underlying tech and the output of that tech really has been iterating rapidly, the state of the art in generative AI in particular producing just staggeringly complex and convincing images, videos, audio, and text, but the lower-tier stuff, which is available to anyone who wants it, for free, is also valuable and useable for all sorts of purposes.Just recently, at the tail-end of March 2025, OpenAI announced new multimodal capabilities for its GPT-4o language model, which basically means this model, which could previously only generate text, can now produce images, as well.And the model has been lauded as a sort of sea change in the industry, allowing users to produce remarkable photorealistic images just by prompting the AI—telling it what you want, basically—with usually accurate, high-quality text, which has been a problem for most image models up till this point. It also boasts the capacity to adjust existing images in all sorts of ways.Case-in-point, it’s possible to use this feature to take a photo of your family on vacation and have it rendered in the style of a Studio Ghibli cartoon; Studio Ghibli being the Japanese animation studio behind legendary films like My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke, among others.This is partly the result of better capabilities by this model, compared to its precursors, but it’s also the result of OpenAI loosening its policies to allow folks to prompt these models in this way; previously they disallowed this sort of power, due to copyright concerns. And the implications here are interesting, as this suggests the company is now comfortable showing that their models have been trained on these films, which has all sorts of potential copyright implications, depending on how pending court cases turn out, but also that they’re no long being as precious with potential scandals related to how their models are used.It’s possible to apply all sorts of distinctive styles to existing images, then, including South Park and the Simpsons, but Studio Ghibli’s style has become a meme since this new capability was deployed, and users have applied it to images ranging from existing memes to their own self-portrait avatars, to things like the planes crashing into the Twin Towers on 9/11, JFK’s assassination, and famous mass-shootings and other murders.It’s also worth noting that the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki, has called AI-generated artwork “an insult to life itself.” That so many people are using this kind of AI-generated filter on these images is a jarring sort of celebration, then, as the person behind that style probably wouldn’t appreciate it; many people are using it because they love the style and the movies in which it was born so much, though. An odd moral quandary that’s emerged as a result of these new AI-provided powers.What I’d like to talk about today is another burgeoning controversy within the AI space that’s perhaps even larger in implications, and which is landing on an unprepared culture and economy just as rapidly as these new image capabilities and memes.—In February of 2025, the former AI head at Tesla, founding team member at OpenAI, and founder of an impending new, education-focused project called Eureka Labs named Andrej Karpathy coined the term ‘vibe coding’ to refer to a trend he’s noticed in himself and other developers, people who write code for a living, to develop new projects using code-assistant AI tools in a manner that essentially abstracts away the code, allowing the developer to rely more on vibes in order to get their project out the door, using plain English rather than code or even code-speak.So while a developer would typically need to invest a fair bit of time writing the underlying code for a new app or website or video game, someone who’s vibe coding might instead focus on a higher, more meta-level of the project, worrying less about the coding parts, and instead just telling their AI assistant what they want to do. The AI then figures out the nuts and bolts, writes a bunch of code in seconds, and then the vibe coder can tweak the code, or have the AI tweak it for them, as they refine the concept, fix bugs, and get deeper into the nitty-gritty of things, all, again, in plain-spoken English.There are now videos, posted in the usual places, all over YouTube and TikTok and such, where folks—some of whom are coders, some of whom are purely vibe coders, who wouldn’t be able to program their way out of a cardboard box—produce entire functioning video games in a matter of minutes.These games typically aren’t very good, but they work. And reaching even that level of functionality would previously have taken days or weeks for an experienced, highly trained developer; now it takes mere minutes or moments, and can be achieved by the average, non-trained person, who has a fundamental understanding of how to prompt AI to get what they want from these systems.Ethan Mollick, who writes a fair bit on this subject and who keeps tabs on these sorts of developments in his newsletter, One Useful Thing, documented his attempts to make meaning from a pile of data he had sitting around, and which he hadn’t made the time to dig through for meaning. Using plain English he was able to feed all that data to OpenAI’s Deep Research model, interact with its findings, and further home in on meaningful directions suggested by the data.He also built a simple game in which he drove a firetruck around a 3D city, trying to put out fires before a competing helicopter could do the same. He spent a total of about $13 in AI token fees to make the game, and he was able to do so despite not having any relevant coding expertise.A guy named Pieter Levels, who’s an experienced software engineer, was able to vibe-code a video game, which is a free-to-play, massively multiplayer online flying game, in just a month. Nearly all the code was written by Cursor and Grok 3, the first of which is a code-writing AI system, the latter of which is a ChatGPT-like generalist AI agent, and he’s been able to generate something like $100k per month in revenue from this game just 17 days, post-launch.Now an important caveat here is that, first, this game received a lot of publicity, because Levels is a well-known name in this space, and he made this game as part of a ‘Vibe Coding Game Jam,’ which is an event focused on exactly this type of AI-augmented programming, in which all of the entrants had to be at least 80% AI generated. But he’s also a very skilled programmer and game-maker, so this isn’t the sort of outcome the average person could expect from these sorts of tools.That said, it’s an interesting case study that suggests a few things about where this category of tools is taking us, even if it’s not representative for all programming spaces and would-be programmers.One prediction that’s been percolating in this space for years, even before ChatGPT was released, but especially after generative AI tools hit the mainstream, is that many jobs will become redundant, and as a result many people, especially those in positions that are easily and convincingly replicated using such tools, will be fired. Because why would you pay twenty people $100,000 a year to do basic coding work when you can have one person working part-time with AI tools vibe-coding their way to approximately the same outcome?It’s a fair question, and it’s one that pretty much every industry is asking itself right now. And we’ve seen some early waves of firings based on this premise, most of which haven’t gone great for the firing entity, as they’ve then had to backtrack and starting hiring to fill those positions again—the software they expected to fill the gaps not quite there yet, and their offerings suffering as a consequence of that gambit.Some are still convinced this is the way things are going, though, including people like Elon Musk, who, as part of his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE efforts in the US government, is basically stripping things down to the bare-minimum, in part to weaken agencies he doesn’t like, but also, ostensibly at least, to reduce bloat and redundancy, the premise being that a lot of this work can be done by fewer people, and in some cases can be automated entirely using AI-based systems.This was the premise of his mass-firings at Twitter, now X, when he took over, and while there have been a lot of hiccups and issues resulting from that decision, the company is managing to operate, even if less optimally than before, with about 20% the staff it had before he took over—something like 1,500 people compared to 7,500.Now, there are different ways of looking at that outcome, and Musk’s activities since that acquisition will probably color some of our perceptions of his ambitions and level of success with that job-culling, as well. But the underlying theory that a company can do even 90% as well as it did before with just a fifth of the workforce is a compelling argument to many people, and that includes folks running governments, but also those in charge of major companies with huge rosters of employees that make up the vast majority of their operating expenses.A major concern about all this, though, is that even if this theory works in broader practice, and all these companies and governments can function well enough with a dramatically reduced staff using AI tools to augment their capabilities and output, we may find ourselves in a situation in which the folks using said tools are more and more commodified—they’ll be less specialized and have less education and expertise in the relevant areas, so they can be paid less, basically, the tools doing more and the humans mostly being paid to prompt and manage them. And as a result we may find ourselves in a situation where these people don’t know enough to recognize when the AI are doing something wrong or weird, and we may even reach a point where the abstraction is so complete that very few humans even know how this code works, which leaves us increasingly reliant on these tools, but also more vulnerable to problems should they fail at a basic level, at which point there may not be any humans left who are capable of figuring out what went wrong, since all the jobs that would incentivize the acquisition of such knowledge and skill will have long since disappeared.As I mentioned in the intro, these tools are being applied to images, videos, music, and everything else, as well. Which means we could see vibe artists, vibe designers, vibe musicians and vibe filmmakers. All of which is arguably good in the sense that these mediums become more accessible to more people, allowing more voices to communicate in more ways than ever before.But it’s also arguably worrying in the sense that more communication might be filtered through the capabilities of these tools—which, by the way, are predicated on previous artists and writers and filmmakers’ work, arguably stealing their styles and ideas and regurgitating them, rather than doing anything truly original—and that could lead to less originality in these spaces, but also a similar situation in which people forget how to make their own films, their own art, their own writing; a capability drain that gets worse with each new generation of people who are incentivized to hand those responsibilities off to AI tools; we’ll all become AI prompters, rather than all the things we are, currently.This has been the case with many technologies over the years—how many blacksmiths do we have in 2025, after all? And how many people actually hand-code the 1s and 0s that all our coding languages eventually write, for us, after we work at a higher, more human-optimized level of abstraction?But because our existing economies are predicated on a certain type of labor and certain number of people being employed to do said labor, even if those concerns ultimately don’t end up being too big a deal, because the benefits are just that much more impactful than the downsides and other incentives to develop these or similar skills and understandings arise, it’s possible we could experience a moment, years or decades long, in which the whole of the employment market is disrupted, perhaps quite rapidly, leaving a lot of people without income and thus a lot fewer people who can afford the products and services that are generated more cheaply using these tools.A situation that’s ripe with potential for those in a position to take advantage of it, but also a situation that could be devastating to those reliant on the current state of employment and income—which is the vast, vast majority of human beings on the planet.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Corphttps://devclass.com/2025/03/26/the-paradox-of-vibe-coding-it-works-best-for-those-who-do-not-need-it/https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-benevolent-artificial-intelligence/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/what-could-possibly-go-wrong-doge-to-rapidly-rebuild-social-security-codebase/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_codinghttps://www.newscientist.com/article/2473993-what-is-vibe-coding-should-you-be-doing-it-and-does-it-matter/https://nmn.gl/blog/dangers-vibe-codinghttps://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/is-vibe-coding-with-ai-gnarly-or-reckless-maybe-some-of-both/https://devclass.com/2025/03/26/the-paradox-of-vibe-coding-it-works-best-for-those-who-do-not-need-it/https://www.creativebloq.com/3d/video-game-design/what-is-vibe-coding-and-is-it-really-the-future-of-app-and-game-developmenthttps://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/openais-new-ai-image-generator-is-potent-and-bound-to-provoke/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ghibli 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
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    18:48
  • Tesla Protests
    This week we talk about Elon Musk, deportations, and the First Amendment.We also discuss electric vehicles, free speech, and Georgia.Recommended Book: Red Rising by Pierce BrownTranscriptGreenpeace is a protest-focused, environmentalist nongovernmental organization that was originally founded in Canada in the early 1970s, but which has since gone on to tackle issues ranging from commercial whaling to concerns about genetic engineering, worldwide.They have 26 independent organizations operating across nearly 60 countries, and their efforts are funded by a combination of grants and donations from individual supporters; and that’s an important detail, as they engage in a lot of highly visible acts of protest, many of which probably wouldn’t be feasible if they had corporate or government funders.They piss a lot of people off, in other words, and even folks who consider themselves to be environmentalists aren’t always happy with the things they do. Greenpeace is vehemently anti-nuclear, for instance, and that includes nuclear power, and some folks who are quite green in their leanings consider nuclear power to be part of the renewable energy solution, not something to be clamped down on. The same is true of their other stances, like their protests against genetic engineering efforts and their at times arguably heavy-handed ‘ecotage’ activities, which means sabotage for ecological purposes, to making their point and disrupt efforts, like cutting down forests or building new oil pipelines, that they don’t like.Despite being a persistent thorn in the side of giant corporations like oil companies, and despite sometimes irritating their fellow environmentalists, who don’t always agree with their focuses or approaches, Greenpeace has nonetheless persisted for decades in part because of their appreciation for spectacle, and their ability to get things that might otherwise be invisible—like whaling and arctic oil exploration—into the press. This is in turn has at times raised sufficient awareness that politicians have been forced to take a stand on things they wouldn’t have otherwise been forced to voice an opinion on, much less support or push against, and that is often the point of protests of any size or type, by any organization.A recent ruling by a court in North Dakota, though, could hobble this group’s future efforts. A company involved in the building of the Dakota Access pipeline accused Greenpeace of defamation, trespass, nuisance, civil conspiracy, and other acts, and has been awarded about $667 million in damages, payable by Greenpeace, because of the group’s efforts to disrupt the construction of this pipeline.The folks at the head of Greenpeace had previously said that a large payout in this case could bankrupt the organization, and while there’s still a chance to appeal the ruling, and they’ve said they intend to do so, this ruling is already being seen as a possible fulcrum for companies, politicians, and government agencies that want to limit protests in the US, where the right to assemble and peaceably express one’s views are constitutionally protected by the first amendment, but where restrictions on protest have long been used by government officials and police to stifle protests they don’t like for various reasons.What I’d like to talk about today is another, somewhat unusual wave of protests we’re seeing in the US and to some degree globally right now, too, and the larger legal context in which these protests are taking place.—When US President Trump first stepped into office back in early 2017, there were protests galore, huge waves of people coming out to protest the very idea of him, but especially his seeming comfort with, and even celebration of, anti-immigration, racist, and misogynistic views and practices, including his alleged sexual abuse and rape of dozens of women, one of whom successfully took him to court on the matter, winning a big settlement for proving that he did indeed sexually assault her.The response to his second win, and his ascension to office for another term in 2025, has been more muted. There have been a lot of protests, but not at the scale of those seen in 2017. Instead, the majority of enthusiasm for protest-related action against this administration has been aimed at Elon Musk, a man who regularly tops the world’s richest people lists, owns big-name companies like SpaceX and Tesla, and who has his own collection of very public scandals and alleged abuses.One such scandal revolves around Musk’s decision to plow hundreds of millions of dollars into getting Trump reelected. As a result of that investment, he was brought into the president’s confidence, and now serves as a sort of hatchet-man via a pseudo-official agency called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.Musk and his team have been jumping from government agency to government agency, conducting mass firings, harassing employees, hacking and by some accounts stealing and deleting all sorts of sensitive data, and generally doing their best to cause as much disruption as possible. Many of their efforts have been pushed back against, eventually, by courts, but that’s only after a lot of damage has already been done.The general theory of their operation is ostensibly to cut costs in the US government, and though outside analysts and watchdogs have shown that they haven’t really managed to do that on any scale, and that their actions will probably actually add to the government’s deficit, not reduce it, Musk and Trump claim otherwise, and that’s enough for many people in their orbit. The unsaid purpose of this group, though, seems to be making the government so ineffective and hollow that businesses, like Musk’s and those of his friends, can step in and do things that were previously done by government agencies, and can reap massive profits as a consequence; folks having to pay more for what was previously provided by the government, and a bunch of rich folks profiting because they’re the only ones capable of providing such services, now that the agencies have been gutted.The courts are still scrambling, as they move a lot slower than individuals with seeming authority and the support of a vindictive president can move, but this has already caused a lot of consternation across the political spectrum, and Musk, though popular with a certain flavor of Republican and far-right voter, has pissed off a lot of more conventional Republicans, in addition to pretty much every Democrat.This is important context for understanding why the most vocal and enthusiastic protests in the US these first few months of 2025 have targeted Musk, and more specifically, Musk’s electric vehicle company, Tesla.Tesla was once celebrated by the political left as the EV company that made EVs sexy and popular, at a time in which this type of vehicle was anything but.Musk’s shift to the political far-right changed that, though, and the general theory of these protests is that Musk is mostly held financially afloat by Tesla’s huge market valuation: Tesla stocks are worth way more than those of other car companies, with a price multiple—how much the stock is worth, compared to how much business the company actually does, and how much their assets are worth—is more akin to that of a dotcom-era tech startup than a car company, the stock price valued at something like 120-times the apparent book value of the company.So Musk, who owns a lot of Tesla stock, can basically borrow money against that stock, and this allows him to tap tens of billions of dollars worth of borrowed money on a whim, because the banks know he’s good for it. In this way he can inflate his supposed worth while also getting liquid cash whenever he needs it, despite not having to sell those stocks he owns.This method of acquiring liquid wealth by leveraging non-liquid assets has allowed him to support Trump’s reascension, but it’s also allowed him to do things like buy Twitter, which he has renamed X and converted into a sort of voicebox for the right and far-right. It has also allowed him to do things like offer money to potential voters who are signed up to vote and who sign petitions that are supportive of far-right causes; which is not quite paying for votes, which is illegal in the US, but it is the closest thing to paying for votes you can get away with, and there’s still debate whether this is actually legal or not, but either way, until the courts catch on up this, too, he’s been able to influence vote outcomes to varying degrees because of that access to money.Some of the biggest and most consistent protesting efforts in the post-second-term-Trump US have revolved around Tesla, its cars, and its dealerships, and the theory of operation here is that by protesting Tesla, you might be able to decrease the company’s market valuation, which in turn decreases Musk’s access to money. Less market value for the company means Musk can’t borrow as much money against it, and if he has less access to liquid wealth, to cash rather than stocks and other illiquid assets, he may become less relevant in the administration, and less capable of influencing elections across the country (and to some degree the world, as he’s throwing money at candidates he favors globally, now, too).These protests have been traditional, in the sense of gathering peacefully outside Tesla dealerships, chanting slogans and carrying signs, but also of a more aggressive sort, including spraypainting Tesla vehicles, doing things to embarrass folks who own these cars, and in some few cases, setting them on fire or otherwise destroying them.The general idea, again, is to make the brand toxic, which in turn should reduce sales, and that, ideally, for the protestors, would then reduce Musk’s access to money, which he is using to influence elections and other such activities and outcomes.The administration has responded to these protests with a bizarre and, it’s generally agreed, pretty embarrassing car commercial for Tesla, held outside the White House, in which Trump claimed he was buying one, and told Americans to buy a car to support Tesla because it’s a wholesome American company.Trump also recently said that he would consider people caught defacing Teslas or even just protesting the brand in non-destructive ways to be domestic terrorists, which is a pretty chilling thought, as some post-9/11 rules about how the government can treat terrorists are still on the books; calling someone a terrorist is a means of doing away with due process and human rights, basically, so this is a threat to go full violent authoritarian on people using their first amendment rights in ways this administration doesn’t like.These protests are occurring within the context of another notable, protest-oriented storyline, one in which students who participated in protests against the US and Israel’s actions in Gaza at Columbia University in New York last spring have been arrested; one was on a visa to the US and was in the process of becoming a doctor—her visa has now been revoked—and the other, who has a green card, and who is thus a permanent US resident, and who has no criminal record, faces a case in immigration court in Louisiana, where he was shipped after being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.His hearing has been scheduled for April 8, and his lawyers are challenging both his detention and the government’s apparent efforts to make an example of him, trying to deport him and do away with his citizenship because he protested against the government’s actions.The administration is claiming they can do this, and can do a bunch of other stuff, including deporting immigrants who they claim, without evidence, are members of a Venezuelan gang; they say there’s legal precedent that gives them the ability to deport enemy aliens, those who are antagonistic to the US and its government, basically—the same sort of rulings that were used to justify deporting anyone sympathetic to the communist party back in the mid-to-late 20th century.This same concept is being floated to justify the deportation of some of the people who have protested against Israel’s and the US’s actions in Gaza, the accusation being that they are supporting Hamas and other organizations that have been declared terrorist organizations by the US, so when folks protest against these governments’ activities in the region, they’re also supporting the causes of terrorist organizations—which then arguably gives the US government the right to deport them, because they weren’t born in the US.The legality of all this is still being debated and working its way through the court system, but the ultimate goal seems to be giving the administration the ability to deport whomever they like, and establishing that immigrants of any kind don’t have the free speech rights that natural born US citizens enjoy; which isn’t concretely established in law, and which these many efforts and court cases are meant to sort out more formally.This administration has also shown itself to be just really antagonistic against any person or entity that defies or criticizes it, including journalistic entities, politicians, or protesting individuals; they’ve used lawsuits, executive orders, and a slew of other tools to legally punish, financially punish, and in many cases socially punish, telling their supporters that it would be a real shame if something happened to these people, seemingly aiming to scare their opponents, while also possibly sparking stochastic violence against them.And this isn’t a US-exclusive thing.In Georgia, the country not the state, the government is levying huge fines on people who protested against its pivot toward allying with Russia instead of moving toward the EU two years ago; they’re using a so-called “foreign agent bill” to accuse anyone who says or does something against the government of being paid by foreign entities, which in turn allows them to crack down on these people hard, while seemingly not violating their good, dedicated, patriotic citizens’ rights.They’ve also started levying fines for the equivalent of about $16,000 on those who participate in protests that even briefly block traffic, which is one more way to asymmetrically hobble people and organizations that might otherwise cause a regime trouble; anyone who does these things in their favor can just have these fines waived or ignored.We’re seeing similar things in Turkey and Hungary, right now, two other countries that have seen widescale protests and significant efforts by their governments to attack those protestors, to get them to stop. In some case these efforts backfire, leading to more and more substantial pushback by the population against increasingly aggressive and abusive regimes.It’s impossible to know ahead of time which way things will go, though, and right now, in the US, most of these anti-protestor efforts are still young, as are the anti-Tesla, anti-Musk protests, themselves. One side or the other could be forced to pivot by judicial rulings—though this could also lead to a long-predicted constitutional crisis, in which the judges say the government can’t do something they want to do, and the government just ignores that ruling, creating an entirely different and arguably more substantial problem.Show Noteshttps://apnews.com/article/columbia-protests-immigration-detention-mahmoud-khalil-755774045e5e82849e3281e8ff72f26dhttps://www.cnn.com/2025/03/21/middleeast/turkey-protests-erdogan-mayor-intl-latam/index.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/world/middleeast/turkey-ekrem-imamoglu-istanbul.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/world/middleeast/turkey-erdogan-democracy-istanbul-mayor-detention.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Turkish_protestshttps://apnews.com/article/turkey-mayor-jailed-istanbul-f962743f724f00a318f84ffaed7f58dehttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/us/politics/what-is-doge-elon-musk-trump.htmlhttps://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/protesters-gather-tesla-showrooms-dealerships-denounce-elon-musk-doge-rcna197595https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/nyregion/columbia-trump-concessions-watershed.htmlhttps://apnews.com/article/hungary-pride-ban-orban-lgbtq-rights-e7a0318b09b902abfc306e3e975b52dfhttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y0zrg9kpnohttps://www.reuters.com/world/europe/hungarys-president-signs-law-banning-pride-parade-despite-protests-2025-03-19/https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/hungarys-orban-vows-fast-crackdown-media-ngos-over-foreign-funding-2025-03-15/https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/15/europe/georgia-protests-authoritarianism-fears-intl-cmd/index.htmlhttps://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/03/georgia-authorities-freeze-accounts-of-organizations-supporting-protesters-to-kill-the-peaceful-protests/https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250323-georgia-cracks-down-on-pro-eu-protests-with-crippling-fineshttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/nyregion/mahmoud-khalil-trump-allegations.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/us/politics/spacex-contracts-musk-doge-trump.htmlhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/21/oil-protest-activism-greenpeace-dakota-pipeline-verdicthttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/greenpeace-lawsuit-energy-transfer-dakota-pipelinehttps://www.cnn.com/2025/03/18/climate/greenpeace-lawsuit-first-amendment/index.htmlhttps://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/what-to-know-about-greenpeace-after-it-was-found-liable-in-the-dakota-access-protest-casehttps://apnews.com/article/greenpeace-dakota-access-pipeline-lawsuit-verdict-5036944c1d2e7d3d7b704437e8110fbbhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeacehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_protest 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
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    19:22

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