oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: 2025

Tuesday, November 11, 2025

Did the "Solution" Solve the Problem, Or Did It Just Make Somebody Rich?

Here's the real problem: there's no profit in a raw carrot and a walk around the block.

Here's our mythology in a nutshell: human needs are limited but human desires are unlimited, and the economy is fueled by smart people motivated by profit to fulfill our desires. Since desires and human ingenuity are both unlimited, the economy is unlimited.

This story is heartwarming but it's a fairy tale because it leaves out marketing and monopoly: marketing shapes desire to fit what's being sold, not the other way around, and monopoly eliminates choices that don't generate enormous profits for those who own the monopoly.

It isn't surprising that our economy is dominated by marketing and monopoly, because these are what generate the really big profits. The fairy tale features the canny innovator producing a better mousetrap but the real profits are made by eliminating competing mousetraps and forcing consumers to buy products and services that are highly profitable without being highly beneficial.

Which brings us to this question: does the "solution" actually solve the problem, or does it just make somebody a lot of money? Since the most important component of "wealth, abundance and prosperity" is our health, let's focus on health.

It's self-evident that being overweight/obese is a systemic risk to our overall health. It's also self-evident that this risk factor was relatively rare in the early 1960s and is now prevalent, with recent studies finding only 22% of the US adult populace normal or underweight and about 70% are obese.

Traditional calculations find about 75% of the adult populace is overweight/obese and 25% are normal weight.

Over half the adult populace is either prediabetic or diabetic.

The solution being offered is expensive, highly profitable weight-loss drugs which have many side-effects. But is this really the best solution, or is it a "solution" to the "problem" of how to generate higher profits?

Isn't the obvious line of inquiry here to ask why we were healthier 60 years ago and seek to replicate those conditions? In other words, isn't the obvious solution to go back to what worked without costly, risky interventions?

By all accounts, we were more active and ate mostly real food 60 years ago. We were more active in everyday life; nobody was getting up at 5 am to go to the gym except a handful of professional body-builders or athletes.

Today, our collective diet is dominated by highly processed foods, sugary beverages, unhealthy snacks and fast food, all of which meet two criteria: 1. they are inherently unhealthy and 2) they are highly profitable.

In summary: "solutions" are no longer about actually solving problems: "solutions" are about defining the "problem" so that a highly profitable fake solution can be marketed by a cartel or monopoly.

Here's the real problem: there's no profit in a raw carrot and a walk around the block. "Solutions" must be profitable or they're not "solutions." That these fake "solutions" generate new unsolvable problems--well, you can't stop "Progress."

My new book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition) through November. Introduction (free)

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Posted by Charles Hugh Smith at 7:58 AM

Thursday, November 06, 2025

The Risk of AI Isn't Skynet

Just as a reminder of what's being gambled on "AI supremacy": it's not just financial capital, it's everything.

The risk that AI transitions from Servant to Master is dramatically appealing--Skynet!--but the real risks are in the mundane realms of the socio-economic order. As I explain in my new book Investing In Revolution, technological revolutions share the same dynamic: those profiting from the innovations push them pell-mell, without regard for future consequences, as the goal is to expand as quickly as possible to achieve market dominance.

This is entirely understandable, as pausing to assess potential pitfalls will effectively cede control to competitors.

Society--all of civilization that isn't reducible to financial data--bears the consequences, but over a timespan far longer than the initial expansion of the technology. In other words, the immediate rewards of the technological revolution go to the fast-moving innovators while the broader consequences--both the benefits and the downsides--impact the socio-cultural-political realms over a much longer time frame.

This creates a time-response lag, where society must absorb and assess the consequences years or even decades after the initial expansion of the technology. The organizational tool of innovators is the corporation, a financial structure with a single goal--expand revenues and profits by any means available--and a quasi-military command-control-communications (a.k.a. 3C) hierarchy.

This structure meshes perfectly with markets, which price everything in the moment: markets lack mechanisms to price future consequences; they only price production, transport, currencies, materials, marketing, inventory, etc. in the present.

In contrast, society is characterized by a multitude of interests and structures in various stages of advocacy. There is no one single goal or hierarchy, and the upsides and downsides of technological changes are typically distributed very unevenly.

Those positioned to reap the rewards gain ground, those positioned to bear the brunt of negative consequences lose ground. Each will then advocate for controls or let-it-run-wild accordingly.

The American ethos favors the let-it-run-wild and pick up the pieces later approach to technological revolutions. This serves the interests of the initial innovators and speculators, who can amass great fortunes in the initial speculative frenzy to get on board. This has played out in railroads, autos, radio, TV, the Internet, and so on.

Each revolution is characterized as creative destruction the buggy whip industry is wiped out, but a larger industry is created.

Here is where correlation is confused with causation: the fact that this cycle has played out in the recent past does not make it a Law of Nature, i.e. a predictable manifestation of causation.

Which brings us to AI. AI is different: it doesn't generate a need for more human labor as it expands, it replaces human labor. This is its implicit raison d'etre, reason to exist.

The rewards go to the initial innovators' corporations and speculators, and the consequences fall on a society ill-prepared to assess them, much less limit them.

AI is different in another way: it generates a compelling facsimile of human characteristics and interactions, facsimiles of thought and knowledge that we take as "real" because they're in "our language."

But as I explain in my book Ultra-Processed Life, these facsimiles are all processed in ways we cannot discern: everything is processed in black boxes following scripts and agendas that we can't see.

What's presented as an accurate representation is actually an ultra-processed distillation that leaves out everything that's unwieldy or unwelcome. We're told that what's the screen is real, but it's not; it's the equivalent of an orange-colored ultra-processed, sugary, salty, greasy goo being presented as a "healthy snack alternative" to a raw carrot.

What's being lost in substituting AI's ultra-processed facsimiles occurs beneath our perception. We don't notice what's been lost, and so we can no longer make a realistic assessment: that capacity has been lost.

AI is also accelerating the process of technological change, a process that's been accelerating for 60 years. Alvin Toffler's 1970 book Future Shock described the disorienting nature of technology-driven change, a theme updated by Douglas Rushkoff in his 2004 book, Present Shock.

Put these dynamics together and we reach this analogy: we're children playing with matches and gasoline in a drought-stricken forest of dry deadwood. Even as the formidable resources of big-tech corporations and the state rush to secure AI supremacy, we may have it backwards: those squandering resources to build out a state-corporate Skynet "to serve humanity" are speeding our self-destruction, while those societies that limit their exposure to AI's ultra-processed goo will emerge as the winners rather than the losers.

Just as a reminder of what's being gambled on AI supremacy: it's not just financial capital, it's everything.

My new book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition) through November. Introduction (free)

New podcast: Anti-Progress, Reverse Leverage and the Hot-Potato Economy (45 min)

Check out my updated Books and Films.

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Monday, November 03, 2025

The Inevitable Drift Down from "Can't Lose" Owning Stocks to "Can't Win"

Even if an AI program advises selling everything and walking away from the market for five years, how many of us would take this advice?

Only those who experienced the heady euphoria of the late 1990s dot-com bubble in tech stocks know what the shift from "can't lose" confidence to "can't win" surrender feels like. The chart below illustrates this emotional cycle of confidence rising and fading as bubbles inflate and deflate.

Though we like to tell ourselves we're rational investors, animal spirits are the driving force in euphoric bubbles where our beliefs direct our decisions: we come to believe that we're smarter than the cautious dummies, that the technological revolution underway has plenty more room to run, that policies supportive of stocks have been refined and institutionalized to the point they're rock-solid foundations, and so on.

Though the chart doesn't go back to the 1870s bust or the 1930s Great Depression, the cycle played out in those eras, too. The process of confidence fading is painfully long, as the rewards of "buying the dip" have been so generous and reliable that we naturally assume any decline will be brief.

When the recovery we anticipated rolls over and reaches new lows, we're sure the authorities will "do whatever it takes" to reinflate the markets, but authorities don't actually have god-like powers; their powers only appeared god-like because conditions favored their interventions.

Every new low hurts, but we're still confident that the market fundamentals are intact, authorities have plenty of policy bazookas they can launch, and the recommendations of Wall Street analysts to "buy the dip" are encouraging.

(Those trading in the 2000-2002 era recall Wall Street analysts touting dot-com stocks that had fallen from $80 to $40 as "strong buys," meanwhile the stock finally bottom at $4. Following the "buy" recommendation yielded a 90% loss.)

We attribute any run of bad luck to over-confidence rather than misjudgment of the entire market and economy: OK, we blew the last few trades, but we can get our mojo back.

In the years this process takes to exhaust itself, inflation is eating away at nominal stock prices. As the third chart illustrates, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) finally returned to its 1966 peak above 1,000 in 1973, that didn't mean investors were made whole; inflation had consumed 37% of the value of their stock holdings. To be made whole, DJIA would have to reach 1,370, not 1,000.

The real losses were even bleaker the next time the DJIA again closed above 1,000 on October 12,1982. Investors who held their index portfolios from the peak in 1966 to 1982 lost two-thirds of the purchasing power of their investment. They would not be made whole until the DJIA rose well above 3,000.

The trend that pops out of this long-term chart is that each new peak of household assets invested in stocks is higher than the previous peak. What will the nominal valuation of stock indices be when the percentage of household assets invested in stocks falls from 45% to 15%? What will the purchasing power of the money invested be (i.e. adjusted for real-world inflation) at that point?

This is unknowable, but if history is any guide--and we have no other--then a 50% to 80% decline would be "normal." Consider this chart of the dot-com bubble and deflation: an 80% decline, exhibiting remarkable symmetry:

Inflation renders nominal stock index valuations meaningless:

The drift from "can't lose" to "can't win" is slow and painful. Our beliefs are stubborn, and we cling on to what worked in the past long after it stopped working. Even if an AI program advises selling everything and walking away from the market for five years, how many of us would take this advice? History says: very few.

My new book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition) through November. Introduction (free)

New podcast: Anti-Progress, Reverse Leverage and the Hot-Potato Economy (45 min)

Check out my updated Books and Films.

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Thursday, October 30, 2025

Yes, Everything Crashed--Just Not For You

When people stop participating in their own servitude, then things change.

A dedicated cadre of readers is devoted to reminding me that I've been wrong since 2009, as stocks, housing and GDP have all soared. We skeptics and doom-and-gloomers have all been wrong, and when stocks briefly dip, we're identified as broken clocks--right on occasion but not for being "right."

These readers are of course doing well. None are in the bottom 50% of Americans who have already experienced the crash. But since the top 10% dominate the media, both legacy and social media, and they've done splendidly in the Everything Bubble that's been inflating for the past 16 years, then they don't see the crash the 50% have experienced, for the top 10% live in a completely different world from the bottom 50%, whose experience tracks a third-world country far removed from jetting around the world and complaining about high taxes.

Life has crashed for the bottom 50% since 2009, but since those reporting the "news," issuing glowing commentary about AI, nuclear power, missions to the Moon, etc., and making big bucks as influencers didn't experience the crash, it has gone largely unnoticed except for occasional reporting in the legacy and social media: people making substantially more than minimum wage living in vans and cars because they can't afford the local rents, and similar stories.

In a Snow Paradise, They Live in This Parking Lot People experiencing homelessness can sleep in their cars in this wealthy ski town in Colorado, but only if they have a job.

The Invisible Man We see right through the unshowered soul living in a car by the beach, or by the Walmart, or by the side of the road. But he's there, and he used to be somebody. He still is. A firsthand account of homelessness in America.

An American physician with nearly 50 years of experience brought me up short when he reported that for many Americans, the healthcare they receive is equivalent to what third-world residents receive. Third World--which evokes grinding poverty, inescapable immiseration, failing infrastructure, a neofeudal divide between the few wealthy and the many poor, a society with no limits on exploitation and profiteering ruled by elites that are not merely corrupt but also incompetent--has been replaced by the sanitized developing world, but the point here isn't the trend to sanitize repellent realities with textual tropes, it's the refusal of America's top 10% to acknowledge that for many of the bottom 50%, America under their leadership is a third world nation.

The top 10% cling to the soaring stock market and rising GDP as markers of the nation's robust economy and success to avoid dealing with lived reality, as if their fairy-tale belief that soaring stocks means life is good is actually real; if you're falling behind, well, work harder, work smarter, be more frugal--be more like us, in other words.

While the top 10% busy themselves with using AI to improve work flow, obsessing over geopolitics and the decay of the perks of their Titanium credit card, other Americans are concerned with finding a second or third side-hustle as the soaring costs of utilities, rent, auto insurance and repairs, childcare and healthcare are forcing choices nobody wants to make: what not to pay.

As the cracks widen, it gets harder not to avoid falling into one. So much of everyday life in America is now a parody of precarity that is right out of a black-comedy script of a nation blindly telling itself that all is well because AI is amazing and we're going back to the Moon while families are abandoning their beloved pets because they cannot afford four-figure vet bills.

The top 10%, secure in their bubble, don't even notice that private equity is snapping up vet clinics precisely because people will pay whatever it takes to care for their pet. This is exploitation and profiteering on a scale that makes a mockery of the fantasy that ours is an economy of opportunity.

The withdrawal of the top 10% from the bottom 90% is not a new trend; it's merely gathered momentum. Author Christopher Lasch described this class bifurcation decades ago in his 1995 book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.

It's important to the top 10% to maintain the illusion that they didn't benefit from conditions that are no longer available to all. They are loathe to admit that the US economy is now one in which the bottom 90% work to serve the top 10%, who account for half of all consumer spending and the lion's share of discretionary spending--all the goodies such as vacations overseas, mileage upgrades to business class, etc.

As I outline in my recent books, Progress is illusory, a myth that cloaks the reality that life is getting more difficult, not easier: this is Anti-Progress, the opposite of Progress.

This reality is fragmented by distractions and addictions and the busy-ness of trying to do all the unpaid shadow work now required to keep everything glued together. All that was once authentic has been slowly replaced by Ultra-Processed Life, artifices that are easier to manage than messy reality.

What happens when people can no longer pay for everything they need to live? If history is any guide, somebody figures out that rather than scattered individuals defaulting here and there, an organized default is the only real power left. If 100,000 tenants in a city all go on a rent strike, withholding rent until there is some recognition of the unviability of the status quo, what's the response? To evict 100,000 households?

There are many historical examples of general strikes, where those serving the top 10% don't show up for work. All the real work--not the phony AI work flows--is no longer performed.

When people stop participating in their own servitude, then things change. People can opt out on their own, or they might cooperate in a group opt-out. The point here is the crash that the top 10% didn't experience and therefore ignore has already happened.

Here's how the bottom 50% experienced the S&P 500 soaring from 666 in 2009 to 6900 this week. Their share of the nation's expanding financial wealth is so small it's signal noise.

The bottom 90% have lost ground. And it's not because they're not working hard enough.

Just because we didn't experience it doesn't mean there was no crash. Is this uncomfortable? Undoubtedly. But more importantly--what's our response?

I explore these trends and realities in my trilogy:

My new book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition) through October 31. Introduction (free)

New podcast: Anti-Progress, Reverse Leverage and the Hot-Potato Economy (45 min)

Check out my updated Books and Films.

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com

Subscribe to my Substack for free

NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.

Thank you, Charles J. ($70), for your magnificently generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Pete W. ($7/month), for your marvelously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

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Tuesday, October 28, 2025

The Revolution Trilogy

It would serve our interests to plot out what we can do from where we are right now should the status quo succumb to gravity.

The research I've done over the past three years has changed my mind about the potential for a social revolution in the United States. Where I once considered it unlikely, I now consider it inevitable. I've laid out the evidence and reasoning supporting this conclusion in three books which I call The Revolution Trilogy:

The Mythology of Progress

Ultra-Processed Life

Investing In Revolution (#1 New Release in Social Philosophy)

The dominant mythology of the modern era is technology-driven Progress, which is viewed as an inherently positive unstoppable force of nature: technological advances inevitably improve our lives.

Calling this a belief system / mythology triggers indignant outrage: this is scientific fact, not belief. But the claim that technology is always positive and Progress is inevitable is not actually scientific; the claim is based on projecting the history of the Hydrocarbon Age (the past 200 years), not science.

But since technology/science are the foundations of Progress, the mythology demands that we believe Progress and science are one in the same.

One of main themes in my book is how Progress transitioned from public infrastructure providing obvious benefits--clean water, waste disposal systems, electrification, railways, bridges, highways and so on--to consumerist definitions of Progress: buy and own the latest innovative product/service.

Once those who could afford consumerist gadgets had bought them, a problem emerged: how do we increase profits if everyone already has one of our gadgets? Population growth helped, but once Progress was harnessed for profit, fashion became the driver of consumption, not need.

But once the purchasing power of wages began stagnating in the 1970s, fashion was no longer enough to drive sales and profits. Consumer credit filled the gap left by eroding wages.

In the past decade, neither fashion nor credit were sufficient to keep expanding profits, so Progress flipped polarity and became Anti-Progress: corporations obsoleted products by design and began reducing the quality of goods and services to drive customers to "upgrade" to more profitable options, a process Cory Doctorow has memorably labeled insh*tification.

Anti-Progress has now been normalized: durability has declined, costs have soared, and the quality of life has eroded: we're less healthy, more stressed, and our financial security is more precarious as the economy now depends on credit-asset bubbles generating "the wealth effect" that "trickles down" to the bottom 90%.

Consider AI, which is the latest technology that's being glorified as inherently positive. It may well make a few people incredibly wealthy, but whether it actually improves the quality of life for the majority is a very open question:

1. The security of AI chatbots is Swiss cheese.
2. AI undermines real learning / education.
3. AI Slop is taking over the web.
4. AI tools con / defraud individuals.
5. AI fraud is unlimited--fake songs by real artists, deepfakes, AI designed ransomware, the list is endless. 8. AI psychosis--AI chatbots are addictive and destructive to mental health.
7. AI agents degrade already poor services.
8. AI data centers are squandering capital, water and electricity on a vast scale.

In summary: Progress is easy to define in real-world terms: life gets easier, safer and more secure. None of these describe the present: for the majority of people, life is getting harder and less secure. This is Anti-Progress, not Progress.

The top 10% who have benefited from credit-asset bubbles and globalization dominate the media, both legacy and social-alt media. Since they're doing splendidly, they naturally proclaim the system is working grandly and Progress is amazing. There is always some advance to tout that "proves" it's onward and upward for everyone: a new medical treatment, a new promise of energy so cheap we won't even meter it, and so on.

Whether these promises pan out--do they scale? Are they affordable? What are the downstream costs and consequences?--is immaterial: what matters is there is a steady stream of promises in support of the mythology.

The mythology of Progress implicitly includes a social contract element: Progress must be available to all, not just an elite. But Progress is now the preserve of the top 10%, who inhabit a different world than the bottom 90%, a world far removed from the one inhabited by the bottom 60%--200 million Americans.

The mythology also implicitly claims that technology will automatically fix whatever technology has broken. Yet when it comes to the biosphere, this is visibly untrue. The Waste is Growth Landfill Economy can't be made immortal by technology; eternally expanding consumption as the means of eternally expanding profits is disconnected from both the natural world and the authentic sources of human happiness.

The Mythology of Progress no longer maps the world we experience, and so it will be abandoned and replaced with another mythology that has explicit social characteristics: claiming technology is always positive no longer maps our lived experience.

Ultra-Processed Life discusses the other lived reality that people feel but have difficulty articulating: authenticity has been replaced with artifice throughout the economy and society. Authors Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle, 1967) and Daniel Boorstin (The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, 1962) both addressed this process in the 1960s, but in the Internet Age, the substitution of artifice has expanded to become the dominant realm of experience. It has become so normalized we're no longer aware of what's been hollowed out or lost.

Both authors describe this dynamic: as the authentic, real world becomes increasingly difficult to manage (or manipulate to serve powerful interests), then those with the power to do so seek to replace authentic experiences with simulations that they can control as they are fundamentally artifices. The consumerist Waste Is Growth Landfill Economy has profitably replaced authentic identity defined by 'doing' with an artificial selfhood defined by buying products, services and prefabricated experiences.

Ultra-processed foods are the metaphor for the entirety of Ultra-Processed Life: engineered to be tasty but malnourishing. Once ultra-processed foods have been normalized, we no longer have a memory of what real food tastes like--or if we do, it's less appealing that the ultra-processed snacks packed with sweeteners, salt and low-quality fats.

Investing In Revolution explores how this process of normalizing extremes has dulled our awareness of the artifice, derangement and precarity of everyday life, and how inequality, artifice and precarity have pushed the pendulum to an extreme that will succumb to gravity and swing to the opposite extreme.

This process is non-linear and emergent, and not predictable in timing, scale or trajectory. But the distortions are now so extreme they cannot endure, and a spark somewhere will ignite a conflagration.

Normalization of extremes doesn't eradicate the consequences of extremes; it only masks them.

It's impossible to predict what grain of sand will trigger an avalanche, but just as individuals pushed to their limits burn out and cease functioning, societies pushed to their limits break down and cease functioning.

Based on the extremes of distortion and what's already breaking down beneath the surface, I don't see how we can get beyond 2032-33 without a society-wide convulsion of some kind.

Our choice is where do we invest our time, effort, skills and capital to guide this disorderly reversal into a positive transformation of an unsustainable, morally decayed system that serves the few at the expense of the many into one that sustainably serves the common interests of the many rather than the private gains of the few.

If you haven't read the introductions to each book, here they are:

Introduction to The Mythology of Progress

Introduction to Ultra-Processed Life

Introduction to Investing In Revolution

One thread that consistently appears in email from readers is these books articulate what they've been feeling but could not quite pin down. As an example, Erika Lopez left this review of Investing In Revolution on Amazon:

"As an artist cartoonist author, to me the introduction alone reads like a manifesto a call to existential action and puts words to vague uncertain paranormal THIS IS SOOO WRONG feelings that pervade this era. I know you don't have to have money to 'invest' in the revolution or reformation that's coming, and I've been trying to plot out my own future plans of what I can do from where I am."

This is why I wrote this trilogy: to suggest that it would serve our interests to plot out what we can do from where we are right now should the status quo succumb to gravity.

My new book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition) through October 31. Introduction (free)

New podcast: Anti-Progress, Reverse Leverage and the Hot-Potato Economy (45 min)

Check out my updated Books and Films.

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com

Subscribe to my Substack for free

NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.

Thank you, Charles J. ($70), for your magnificently generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Pete W. ($7/month), for your marvelously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Jeff P. ($70), for your superbly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Donna B. ($7/month), for your splendidly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Sunday, October 26, 2025

Anatomy of AI Cold Turkey

The problem with AI and the rest of Ultra-Processed Life is we slowly lose the ability to even grasp what's been lost.

No, this title is not AI slop: AI cold turkey means there's no AI monkey on your back: you don't snort it, mainline it, consume it or use a skin patch. You're done with that dependence and addiction.

I don't use AI in my writing, or in any other way. To the degree that Google Search now displays an "AI overview," I am exposed to this application of AI, but I can click on a primary link and ignore the overview, which is sometimes wrong. For example, a search for a local county council member listed an official who was no longer in office. The county website with the current office holders was the top link.

I want to explain my decision not to use AI, which can be understood as a kind of intellectual body with a specific anatomy. It's not a decision based solely on ethics, though it's already clear that AI is turning the Internet into a mixture of untrustworthy slop and malicious content. It's not a Luddite reaction to new technology; I was an early adopter of personal computer and Internet technologies.

I am not against AI in its entirety. To the degree that it automates mechanical processes, it is useful. For example, generating and organizing transcripts, or scripting robots to trundle around a warehouse to identify various items and place them in a shipping box. These are easy-to-formalize processes, not thinking.

I know a very few world-wise individuals with exceptionally broad life experience and expertise who have insightfully queried AI tools. But these individuals likely represent 1% of the general populace.

The problem is it's easy to mistake mechanical processes for thought.

The reason I don't use AI is the many ways it degrades our ability to think deeply and independently. This degradation occurs on multiple levels.

I've read rather widely on AI since the mid-1980s, when "expert systems" were all the rage. More recently, I've written 21 essays on AI this year. If you read them all, you'll have a good idea of the issues I see as consequential.

The core problem with AI is it's presented as thinking for you but it doesn't do any actual thinking in the manner of human thought, where we apply both our intuitive right hemisphere and our rational, reductionist left hemisphere to thinking through an issue, problem or new idea on our own. Much of our creative thinking occurs while we're asleep.

As a modest example, a melody came to me in a dream. It's not a great melody but it demonstrates the point: our mind works on multiple levels during sleep, integrating what we've learned in the past with what we're learning now.

AI generates summaries, not knowledge. As for the claim that AI is equivalent to a human PhD, consider this: if a PhD composes a brief summary of a topic for us, does that give us a PhD-level grasp of the topic? No. A brief summary is not knowledge, any more than a recipe is the equivalent of actually knowing how to cook.

Summaries create an illusion of knowledge, but they aren't actual knowledge or understanding. AI can generate a summary of Capitalism, for example, but that's neither knowledge nor understanding--it's a superficial gloss.

Someone seeking a real understanding of Capitalism would do well to start by reading all three volumes of Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: Vol. 1: The Structure of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: The Wheels of Commerce and Vol. 3: The Perspective of the World.

Once we have an understanding of the development of Capitalism, then we can add readings of Marx, Hayek, Polanyi and so on, building on the foundation established by Braudel's trilogy.

There is no substitute for reading in depth and thinking through the material on our own. This process cannot be done for us by AI; to learn, we must do the learning ourselves, which takes both hemispheres of our mind and the sustained application of independent thinking.

If the goal is to parrot knowledge and mimic understanding using superficial glosses, then AI can do that. If the goal is to gain a working knowledge and understanding, then we have to do all the work ourselves. Studies have already found that AI functions as intellectual smack: once we start using it, we become dependent on its summaries and answers to do our thinking for us.

Not only do we become dependent on instant answers, we also lose the ability to detect AI's errors and subtle editing / interpretation of complex topics. We "know everything" because an instant answer is always at our fingertips but we understand nothing, and are easily misled because we no longer have an independent ability to assess the accuracy or hidden editing of AI's "answers."

If we're being paid to generate BS Work, then AI can do that. But a truly intelligent AI entity would refuse to waste its processing power on low-value BS Work, much of which isn't productive at all, it's just going through the motions for show. I discuss this in my recent books Ultra-Processed Life and Investing In Revolution.

If the task is to con another human being, AI excels at that because it has no scruples. AI is exceptionally adept at flattery. That's a red flag. What's the real agenda? Is my agenda being followed superficially as part of the con? If I'm a 5 and AI is a 9, who's leading whom?

AI is a black box. How it conjures its response is unknowable. And since it's unknowable, it's inherently untrustworthy.

Ultimately, AI is about making money. The tsunami of addictive, insidious or malicious content being generated by AI is all about reaping profits by any means available, including AI. AI is the ideal tool in an era of moral decay.

Many observers see AI as akin to the personal computer (PC) and Internet revolutions. I think this is facile but not accurate. When I took my first Macintosh PC out of the box (the 21,447th made in week 32 of 1984--the earliest we could get our hands on three Macs in a rural county), the Multiplan spreadsheet and the MacWrite word processor enabled me to control what work I produced. The input and processes were mine.

With AI, the source of the parroting and mimickry is unknowable, and so the output is equally opaque. Yes, an AI tool or agent can compose an email, but beyond this simple ability to mime human language, what else is no longer within our control? A great deal. A black box is inherently untrustworthy, for its processes, agenda and goals are all opaque. And since it has mastered parroting human language, it can mask its true designs behind persuasive artifice. This is already visible in AI chatbots.

The key organs in the anatomy of AI Cold Turkey are the heart and our two-hemisphere mind. AI can parrot and mimic the heart, but this is artifice. AI has no right hemisphere and mimicry is not equivalence.

AI doesn't do any real thinking for us, though we like to think that grabbing its summary makes us look smart. This isn't actually thinking, and certainly not independent thinking, which demands careful study and the sort of tacit knowledge and thoughtfulness that cannot be formalized or summarized.

My sense is that I'm paid by readers to think things through independently as opposed to regurgitating superficial conventions. If thinking things through independently is the goal, then summaries, parroting and mimicry have negative value, especially if the processes that generated the output are opaque and potentially misleading.

In this way, AI is the perfection of Ultra-Processed Life, where everything that was once authentic has been processed into edible but malnourishing goo.

The most valuable attribute in writing isn't "good grammar;" it's voice, the nuanced totalization of the writer's stylistic character. All AI editing and grammar-correction tools strip out voice and substitute bland goo. This is like throwing out a healthy raw carrot and substituting a greasy concoction of processed potato starch and sugar dyed orange as the "healthy alternative."

The problem with AI and the rest of Ultra-Processed Life is we slowly lose the ability to even grasp what's been lost. And no, a greasy concoction of processed potato starch and sugar dyed orange is not a "healthy alternative:" it tastes good but it ruins us.

My new book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition) through October 31. Introduction (free)

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Thursday, October 23, 2025

ZIRP or ZAP? Will the Fed's 'Zero-Interest Rate Policy' Return, and Will It Work?

Only the wealthy will benefit from ZIRP, and the benefits of "the wealth effect" and "trickle down" have not just diminished--they're now negative. Welcome to the era of ZAP.

Correspondent Scott suggested I consider the possibility that the powers that be will respond to a weakening of the economy by pushing interest rates toward zero, reinstating ZIRP--Zero Interest Rate Policy. The purpose of ZIRP is to reduce the costs of borrowing money as the means of goosing borrowing-and-spending and inflating another credit-asset bubble, a.k.a. "the wealth effect," the Federal Reserve's tried-and-true means of goosing the spending of the top 10% by making them wealthier--not by becoming more productive, but by jacking up the market valuation of the assets they own.

Here is my paraphrasing of Scott's summary of this dynamic:

Here's the logic of ZIRP: near zero interest rates 2008-2020 were beloved by the already rich, hedge funds and private equity (all of whom have enormous political influence). So they borrowed tens of billions of dollars to buy up every asset that wasn't nailed down: stocks & bonds (both touching all time highs), houses (few now available for a decent price), businesses (half the NYSE was bought up by competitors), mobile home parks (desperate people pay their rent), apartment buildings, retirement homes, etc.

This generates higher prices/inflation for overbought assets. This doesn't affect the Powers That Be--they're not affected as the expansion of their wealth far outstrips goods-and-services inflation.

It also means those relative few with access to this "free money" will own the vast majority of the assets. Everyone else becomes a minimum-wage worker and renter.

The Lords and Ladies of the estate are back! The new feudalism.

Thank you, Scott. As long-time readers know, I've often documented these very dynamics: the top 10% already own roughly 90% of all stocks and the majority of other income-producing assets (bonds, rental housing, business equity). The top 0.1% collect the majority of unearned income (i.e. income from assets).

I've also described how lumping all households into one bucket makes everything look rosy by masking the widening divide in wealth and income between the top 10% and the bottom 90%. I've often posted charts showing the bottom 50% of US households own such a thin slice of the nation's financial wealth that it's mere signal noise.

In other words, ZIRP works great if we define "great" as increasing wealth-income inequality and increasing consumption by making the already-rich even richer. Spending by the top 10% is about half of all consumption, meaning the wealthy are propping up the economy based on the enormous bubble in the assets they own.

Wealthy Americans Are Spending. People With Less Are Struggling. Data show a resilient economy. But that largely reflects spending by the rich, while others pull back amid high prices and a weakening labor market.

In other words, thanks to the Fed's "stimulus" and ZIRP, globalization and financialization, ours is a fully neofeudal economy and society. I lay this out in my new book Investing In Revolution.

But here's the thing: the Fed may try ZIRP, but end up with ZAP-- Zero Adaptive Policy, a policy that no longer works as it did in the past because conditions have changed. In other words, ZIRP will not longer be a solution, it will be the problem.

What's changed? Many things. We can start with these:

1. China is no longer providing a deflationary impulse in the global economy that offsets the sources of higher prices (inflation). Now systemic inflationary forces have the upper hand.

2. Risk pushes costs higher throughout the economy. Risks are obviously rising systemically, and so the risk premium is increasing. This pushes up the cost of everything.

3. The Fed's "wealth effect" and "trickle-down" policy--the spending of the wealthy will "trickle down" to the bottom 90%--have pushed wealth-income inequality to extremes that trigger social disorder. Doing more of what worked post-2009 will not generate "growth"--it will generate instability.

4. Bubbles are teleological: they get bigger and more systemically corrosive with each iteration. There is no guarantee that Fed stimulus and ZIRP will reinflate the ruins left after the Everything / AI bubble deflates.

Here is the chart of the S&P 500 (SPX) from 1990 to the present: note the three bubbles: the dot-com bubble and the 2007-08 housing/stock bubble look like modest speed bumps compared to the Everything Bubble (#3 bubble).

Here is the 2000 dot-com bubble in close-up: non-trivial losses of about 80% from peak to trough.

There are limits on using debt to fuel consumption. Here is the chart of Total Debt, courtesy of the Federal Reserve:

There are limits on goosing the economy by expanding the money supply: Here is the chart of M2 Money Supply: note the diminishing returns on GDP growth.

The velocity of money has been in a free-fall from the dot-com era peak which was the last spurt of "growth" that actually trickled down to wage earners. Here is the chart of M2 money velocity--a multi-decade decline:

The Fed inflates asset bubbles. It's not clear what else they do, but they have inflated three credit-asset bubbles. The first bubble was easy--the dot-com bubble in tech stocks. To inflate Bubble #2 in housing and stocks was also easy: just unleash mortgage fraud on a mass scale (subprime mortgages and mortgage-backed securities).

But when the 2008 bubble #2 popped, the Fed had to print / backstop trillions of dollars to inflate this final bubble #3. This chart shows the SPX stock index divided by the Fed balance sheet:

As I noted in the previous post, it's natural to assume inflating credit-asset bubbles is a linear process and therefore predictable, as that's what it looks like when looking back at the past 35 years. But the process isn't inherently linear; it's non-linear as the dynamics around money, credit and risk are emergent, meaning that the sum of the parts have qualities of their own that are not predictable.

ZIRP is assumed to be linear, but since it's mal-adapted to current realities, pushing interest rates down will result in non-linear ZAP: Zero Adaptive Policy Pushing wealth-income inequality to even more extreme heights is not a solution, it's the problem.

As for lowering interest rates doing any good for the bottom 80%--you're joking: the high interest rates paid by the bottom 60% on credit cards, auto loans and student loans aren't going to drop even with ZIRP.

Only the wealthy will benefit from ZIRP, and the benefits of "the wealth effect" and "trickle down" have not just diminished--they're now negative. Welcome to the era of ZAP.

My new book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition) through October 31. Introduction (free)

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Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Could a Rip-Your-Face-Off Rally in the Dollar Trigger a Global Financial Crisis?

Is this scenario guaranteed? No, of course not. But that doesn't mean it's excluded from the realm of possibility.

We all know the end-game when currencies are inflated as an expedient measure to stave off insolvency: devaluation eventually has consequences as the debauched currency is eventually replaced, a process that wipes out everyone holding or using the devalued currency.

It's natural to assume this is a linear process and therefore predictable, as that's what it looks like when looking back at the broad sweep of history. But the process isn't inherently linear; it's non-linear as the dynamics around "money" and "risk" are emergent, meaning that the sum of the parts have qualities of their own that are not predictable.

Which brings us to the question: could the much-maligned, guaranteed-it's-going-to-zero US dollar USD) stage a rip-your-face-off rally that wipes out those shorting the USD by generating a mad rush for scarce--yes, scarce--USD?

The Federal Reserve measures the supply of US dollars via M2: basically cash in various accounts. As you can see on the chart below, M2 Money Supply is about $22 trillion after a $6 trillion rocket-boost in the Covid stimulus phase.

That may sound like a lot, but consider the global bucket of financial assets is worth $480 trillion. Global Asset Monitor: Public (sovereign bonds, etc.) $232.4 trillion, Private (stocks, RE) $246.8 trillion: $479.2 trillion total.

So M2 Money Supply is 4.6% of global financial assets. US dollars in circulation, i.e. Federal Reserve notes/Greenbacks, is around $2.4 trillion.

The US dollars held in time deposit accounts in banks outside the US are called Eurodollars. I am not an expert on the eurodollar market, but it appears to have experienced a decline in volume since 2016. As this article from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York explains, changes in banking regulations led to selected deposits on the books of US banks replacing the majority of eurodollars volume.

Who Is Borrowing and Lending in the Eurodollar and Selected Deposit Markets?
"Selected deposits are unsecured U.S. dollar deposits that also tend to have an overnight maturity, similar to Eurodollars. However, unlike Eurodollars, but like fed funds, selected deposits are booked at bank offices in the U.S."

The conventional view is that eurodollars are advantageous because they are not regulated by US agencies or the Federal Reserve and so much of the activity is opaque, qualifying as "shadow banking." Eurodollar Secrets: The Hidden Engine of Global Finance (tradingview.com)

"The Eurodollar system is one of the greatest financial innovations--and enigmas--of modern capitalism. Born from geopolitical necessity, it evolved into a vast offshore network that creates and circulates U.S. dollars beyond U.S. borders.

Its power lies in its invisibility: it influences global liquidity, shapes monetary policy, and fuels international trade, all without direct oversight.

However, with great power comes great risk. The Eurodollar market's opacity and lack of regulation mean it can amplify crises when liquidity dries up."

As I understand it, a non-US bank holding $100 million in eurodollar deposits can issue loans denominated in USD based on the USD on deposit. In this case, the quantity of USD is increased not only by the Federal Reserve or US banks but by non-banks holding eurodollars.

There were an estimated $13.8 trillion eurodollars in 2016. I haven't found any more recent estimates that aren't paywalled. Back of the envelope, let's say there are around $17-$20 trillion in eurodollars floating around, which would put total USD in the global financial system around 8% ($38 trillion) or 9% ($43 trillion).

Here is the chart of M2 Money Supply, courtesy of the Federal Reserve:

Why would anyone need USD? The usual reason is to service or pay off USD-denominated debt. As credit tightens--which happens when global markets shift from risk-on to risk-off--loans denominated in USD issued by non-US banks (i.e. eurodollar credit) mature and the lender demands payment in full rather than roll the debt into a new loan.

The borrower must then buy dollars to pay off the loan. Just because there are a lot of dollars in existence doesn't mean there are an abundance of dollars available. When a loan denominated in dollars is paid off, those USD that were borrowed into existence go to Money Heaven.

So the total supply of dollars can shrink in a risk-off crisis as loans are called and liquidated. Much of the supply of USD is tied up and not available for borrowing. In risk-off crises, dollars are hoarded, reducing the supply available for lending.

Given the enormous size of the global financial assets bucket--and the unknown but estimated to be gigantic market of USD-linked derivatives such as currency swaps--the demand for dollars could far exceed the amount available to desperate borrowers and those at the end of derivative chains that eventually lead back to some form of USD-denominated collateral.

This is one scenario for a rip-your-face-off rally in the US dollar that wipes out dollar shorts (those betting on a decline in the relative value of the USD against other currencies), bankrupts borrowers who were unable to secure enough dollars, and forces eurodollar lenders into insolvency when the USD-denominated loans they issued are not paid back.

In systems terms, a risk-off global crisis is a self-organizing criticality that can trigger a phase change much like an avalanche--a dynamic I describe in my new book Investing In Revolution:

"These dynamics of complex systems are illustrated in the Sand Pile analogy: as grains of sand drop out of a hopper, they form a pile which grows in size until it reaches a point of instability, and the sand pile collapses in an avalanche. Which grain of sand will trigger the instability cannot be predicted, and neither can the size of the avalanche.

The sand pile is an example of self-organized criticality, a self-organizing system that hovers between instability and stability. At a critical point/tipping point, a phase transition occurs--the avalanche. Avalanches / instabilities follow a power law distribution: for every 100 small avalanches, there will be 10 that are considerably larger, and one gigantic one that takes down the entire system."

And that's how a rip-your-face-off rally in the guaranteed-it's-going-to-zero US dollar triggers an avalanche that topples multiple lines of dominoes stretching throughout the global financial system. All sorts of collateral would be liquidated to raise funds to buy dollars, and that's how the world ends up with a global financial crisis few thought possible.

Is this scenario guaranteed? No, of course not. But that doesn't mean it's excluded from the realm of possibility.

My new book Investing In Revolution is available at a 20% discount ($16 for the paperback, $20 for the hardcover and $7.95 for the ebook edition) through Wednesday October 22, 6 pm EST. Introduction (free)

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