Let's Know Things

• Supersonic Flight

  This week we talk about Mach 1, the Bell X-1, and the Concorde.We also discuss the X-59, the Tu-144, and Boom Supersonic.Recommended Book: Red Team Blues by Cory DoctorowTranscriptThe term “supersonic,” when applied to speed, refers to something moving faster than the speed of sound—a speed that is shorthanded as Mach 1.The precise Mach 1 speed of sound will be different depending on the nature of the medium through which an object is traveling. So if you’re moving at sea level versus up high in the air, in the stratosphere, the speed of sound will be different. Likewise if you’re moving through moist air versus dry air, or moving through water versus moving through syrup, different speed of sound, different Mach 1.In general, though, to give a basic sense of how fast we’re talking here, if an object is moving at sea level through dry air at a temperature of 20 degrees celsius, which is 68 degrees fahrenheit, Mach 1 is about 768 miles per hour, which is about 1,126 feet per second, and 343.2 meters per second.It’s fast! It’s very fast. Again, this is the speed at which sound moves. So if you surpass the speed of sound, if you go supersonic, you will arrive faster than the sound you make while moving.Back in 1947, an experimental American plane called the Bell X-1 broke the sound barrier, surpassed Mach 1, reaching a speed of almost 1,000 miles per hour using a 6,000 pound thrust rocket propulsion system. A later version of the same rocket-powered plane, the Bell X-1A, which was basically the same vehicle, it just had more fuel capacity, allowing the rocket to burn longer, achieved 1,600 miles per hour in 1956.Prior to that, in 1943, British began working on a secret experimental aircraft called the Miles M.52, intending to build a plane capable of traveling 1,000 mph. Interestingly, this project was apparently the result of the British wanting to keep up with a supposed already existing German aircraft capable of achieving that speed, though it’s now believed the intelligence that led the British to believe the Germans had a supersonic-capable plane was the result of a mistranslation—the Germans hit 1,000 km per hour, which is about 621 mph, and still subsonic.Though apparently a success in terms of research and innovation, the Miles M.52 project was cancelled in 1946, due partly to budgetary concerns, and partly because the new government didn’t believe supersonic aircraft were practical, or maybe even feasible.After the existence of this project was revealed to the public, however, criticism for the cancellation mounted, and the design was translated into new, unmanned scale-model experimental versions of the plane which achieved controlled Mach 1.38 supersonic speeds, and both the design and research from this program was shared with the American company, Bell, and all that knowledge informed the development of the aforementioned Bell X-1 supersonic plane.Again, that successful Bell mission was flown in 1947, and in 1961, a Douglas jetliner, a commercial jet, broke the sound barrier during a controlled test dive, and that fed the development of an intended supersonic airliner in the US, though similar research being conducted elsewhere would bear more direct and immediate fruit.In the Soviet Union, a supersonic jetliner called the Tupolev Tu-144 entered service in 1968, and a jetliner co-developed by the British and French, the Concorde, began construction in 1965, and tallied its first flight in March of 1969.The Tu-144 was thus the world’s first commercial supersonic airliner, by a few months, and it also became the first commercial transport to exceed Mach 2, twice the speed of sound, in 1970.The Tu-144 was plagued by reliability issues from the get-go, however, and while performing maneuvers at an air show in Paris in 1973, it disintegrated in midair, which—combined with its high operating costs reduced its long-term market viability, especially internationally. By the mid-1970s, it was primarily operating within the Soviet Union, and after a new variant of the jet crashed in 1978, the Tu-144 program was cancelled in 1983. Existing models continued to be use for niche purposes, like training space program pilots, and for a supersonic research program undertaken by NASA in the late-1990s, but the final Tu-144 flight was in mid-1999, and all surviving aircraft are now on display or in storage.The Concorde has a similar history. Original forecasts for the supersonic airliner market were optimistic, and while the craft seemed to be generally more reliable and less issue-prone than the Tu-144, and it enjoyed a period of fanfare and promotion, as a sort of luxury experience for folks crossing the Atlantic in particular, cutting travel times in half, a major crash in mid-2000, which killed all 109 occupants and four people on the ground, led to the suspension of service until late-2001, and all remaining Concorde aircraft were retired in 2003—about 20 of them are on display throughout North American and Europe, as of the mid-2020s.The costs associated with operating Concorde aircraft, as with the Tu-144, were also quite high, and those costs and other complications led to the cancellation of a would-be supersonic jetliner competitor from Boeing, the 2707, in 1971, before it built any prototypes.What I’d like to talk about today is a renewed enthusiasm for supersonic passenger aircraft, and what’s changed that might make supersonic transport a viable market, today.—In the United States, commercial aircraft are not allowed to fly at supersonic speeds. This is because the sonic booms generated by supersonic flight, which are shockwaves that work a bit like the crack of a bullwhip or the firing of a bullet, but much, much larger, can set off alarms, rattle or shatter windows, and generally create all sorts of chaos on the ground, even in areas not directly under the aircraft that’s breaking the sound barrier.This was true even during the heyday of the Concorde: the craft was only allowed to travel at supersonic speeds over the ocean, because doing so over populated areas was such a pain, and in some cases, a danger.Sonic booms aren’t the only reason supersonic aircraft like the Concorde failed to establish a long-term presence in the airline industry, but they’re a big part of it. It’s just really difficult to work around that kind of persistent issue.This is why a new experimental project by NASA, the X-59 Quesst, with two-s’s, Quesst standing for Quiet SuperSonic Technology, is garnering so much attention. Built by Lockheed Martin, the X-59 is said to dramatically reduce the scale of sonic booms, instead producing what’s been described as a sonic thump, its long, slender nose breaking up the pressure waves that otherwise build up and create that much larger, more impactful shock wave boom, and its engine is on top of the plane rather than underneath it, a design choice that sends the majority of remaining shock wave impacts upward toward the sky, rather than down toward the ground.The X-59 is still just an experimental jet. It’s a single-seater, it’s about twice as long as an F-16 fighter jet, and it can cruise at around 925 miles per hours, which is Mach 1.4.It’s hoped that this new design will allow for the creation of future supersonic jetliners, though, as being able to traverse oceans twice as fast would bring massive economic benefits, in terms of shipping people, but also all kinds of goods. Being able to use these aircraft fully, at their full speed, over land and to and from any airport, would likewise make them more versatile and introduce new benefits and, hopefully, favorable economics.Worth noting here is that this jet is a descendent of that first Bell X-1 plane that broke the sound barrier in 1947; NASA’s X-planes are innovative models meant to push the boundaries of what’s currently possible, and the X-59 is just a more modern version of that initial X-1 conception in many ways.That said, the X-59 has only been successfully flown at low speeds and altitudes at this point. It got a lot of press at the end of October 2025 for successfully completing its first flight, which shows it can fly and land, which is good. But its inaugural flight stuck with a low altitude and just 240 miles per hour; really slow for a jet, and too low for a commercial airliner.The folks behind this project have also said that while they have every reason to believe this design will both work and create a far less impactful sonic boom, they don’t yet know if that boom will actually be tolerable for people on the ground. Simulating such things is different from the experience of them, and they won’t know until they power the thing all the way up and have it break the sound barrier whether the sonic thump will be barely noticeable and tolerable for folks near airports and flight paths, or if it will be better, but still not good enough to make this a viable alternative to existing jets.There are other entities working on similar things right now, including a company called Boom Supersonic that has already flown a piloted demonstration aircraft, the XB-1, at supersonic speeds—Mac 1.122, which is about 750 mph—at an altitude of over 35,000 feet; the first time a non-government-affiliated aircraft has done so.That was back in March of 2024, and the company plans to build a commercial supersonic aircraft that will carry between 64 and 80 passengers at Mach 1.7, on hundreds of global routes; they say they already have a large number of orders for this passenger aircraft they intend to build, and they say to begin with, they’ll be able to produce 66 of them per year from their factory in North Carolina. They say that they’ll have the first full-scale prototype of that passenger aircraft, called the Overture, in 2027, and they’re aiming to put that craft into service beginning in 2029 or 2030.They’re not the only private company aiming to produce supersonic aircraft for various purposes, either. The promise of moving people and things around the world, faster than most of today’s options can manage, and in many cases far faster, is still tantalizing for many industries, so long as regulatory, safety, and technological hurdles can be traversed. For most of these private companies, their innovation seems to be mostly in price and scale, not reducing the boom, but some have also claimed that their sonic booms are more moderated; there’s also a good chance findings from the NASA X project will translate over to the commercial world in due time, if these companies survive, blending those innovations.It’s an interesting moment in this space, then, in part because it seems like supersonic flight is appealing again, to some, at least, after a long period of dashed hopes—that dashing partly the consequence of flaws in earlier models, and headline-grabbing crashes that ruined a lot of appetites for the option.But also because we could see modern technologies, from sensors to propulsion systems to manufacturing capacities applied to this vehicle type, which could ease a lot of the issues that made the Concordes and Tu-144s non-workable the first time around, and could make this type of transport and travel cheaper, too, though probably not until mid-century at the earliest, according to current timelines.Show Noteshttps://arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/nasa-test-flight-seeks-to-help-bring-commercial-supersonic-travel-back/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boomhttps://www.wired.com/story/nasas-quiet-supersonic-jet-takes-flight/https://www.sofeminine.co.uk/back-in-4-years-your-london-new-york-time-slashed-by-3-hours-as-60-80-seat-supersonic-jet-nears/https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/nasa-takes-step-closer-launching-quiet-supersonic-jets-127036299https://boomsupersonic.com/https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/lowsup.htmlhttps://www.nasa.gov/aeronautics/supersonic-flight/https://www.spikeaerospace.com/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_M.52https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_X-1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_aircrafthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_transporthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_speed This is a public episode. 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• Workplace Automation

  This week we talk about robots, call center workers, and convenience stores.We also discuss investors, chatbots, and job markets.Recommended Book: The Fourth Consort by Edward AshtonTranscriptThough LLM-based generative AI software, like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, are becoming more and more powerful by the month, and offering newfangled functionality seemingly every day, it’s still anything but certain these tools, and the chatbots they power, will take gobs of jobs from human beings.The tale that’s being told by upper-management at a lot of companies makes it seem like this is inevitable, though there would seem to be market incentives for them to both talk and act like this is the case.Companies that make new, splashy investments in AI tech, or which make deals with big AI companies, purporting to further empower their offerings and to “rightsize” their staff as a consequence, tend to see small to moderate bumps in their stock price, and that’s good for the execs and other management in those companies, many of whom own a lot of stock, or have performance incentives related to the price of their stock built into their larger pay package.But often, not always, but quite a lot of the time, the increased effectiveness and efficiencies claimed by these higher-ups after they go on a firing spree and introduce new AI tools, seem to be at least partly, and in some cases mostly attributable to basically just threatening their staff with being fired in a difficult labor market.When Google executives lay off 5 or 10% of their staff on a given team, for instance, and then gently urge those who survived the cull to come to the office more frequently rather than working from home, and tell them that 60 hours a week is the sweet spot for achieving their productivity goals, that will tend to lead to greater outputs—at least for a while. Same as any other industry where blood has been drawn and a threat is made if people don’t live up to a casually stated standard presented by the person drawing that blood.Also worth mentioning here is that many of the people introducing these tools, both into their own companies and into the market as a whole, seem to think most jobs can be done by AI systems, but not theirs. Many executives have outright said that future businesses will have a small number of people managing a bunch of AI bots, and at least a few investors have said that they believe most jobs can be automated, but investing is too specialized and sophisticated, and will likely remain the domain of clever human beings like themselves.All of which gestures at what we’re seeing in labor markets around the globe right now, where demands for new hires are becoming more intense and a whole lot of low-level jobs in particular are disappearing entirely—though in most cases this is not because of AI, or not just, but instead because of automation more broadly; something that AI is contributing to, but something that is also a lot bigger than AI.And that’s what I’d like to talk about today. The rapid-speed deployment, in some industries and countries, at least, of automated systems, of robots, basically, and how this is likely to impact the already ailing labor markets in the places that are seeing the spearpoint of this deployment.—Chatbots are AI tools that are capable of taking input from users and responding with often quite human-sounding text, and increasingly, audio as well.These bots are the bane of some customers who are looking to speak to a human about some unique need or problem, but who are instead forced to run a gauntlet of AI-powered bots. The interaction often happens in the same little chat window through which they’ll eventually, if they say the right magic words, reach a human being capable of actually helping them. And like so many of the AI innovations that have been broadly deployed at this point, this is a solution that’s generally hated by customers, but lauded by the folks who run these companies, because it saves them a lot of money if they can hire fewer human beings to handle support tickets, even if those savings are the result of most people giving up before successfully navigating the AI maze and reaching a human customer support worker.In India right now, the thriving call center industry is seeing early signs of disruption from the same. IT training centers, in particular, are experimenting with using audio-capable AI chatbots instead of human employees, in part because demand is so high, but also, increasingly, because doing so is cheaper than hiring actual human beings to do the same work.One such company, LimeChat, recently said that it plans to cut its employee base by 80% in the near-future, and if that experiment is successful, this could ripple through India’s $283 billion IT sector, which accounts for 7.5% of India’s GDP. Hiring growth in this sector already collapsed in 2024 and 2025, and again, while this shift seems to be pretty good for the balance books of the companies doing less hiring and more firing as they deploy more AI systems, it’s very not good for the often younger people who take these jobs, specializing in call center IT work, only to find that the market no longer demands their skill sets.Along the same lines, but in a perhaps more surprising industry, some convenience stores in Japan are deploying robots to manage their back rooms, where the products that end up available out front are unloaded, tallied, and shelved.These robots, which are basically just arms on poles, sometimes attached to wheeled bases, for moving around, sometimes not, are operated by AI, but are also continuously monitored by human employees in the Philippines. Each worker, who can be paid a lot less than an entry-level, young Japanese person would expect to be paid, monitors about 50 machines at a time, and steps in, using virtual reality gear to control the robots, if one of them gets stuck or drops something; which apparently happens about 4% of the time.This is akin to offshoring of the kind we’ve seen since the early 2000s, when the dawn of technological globalization made China the factory of the world and everything shifted from a model of local production and the stockpiling of components, to a last-minute, supply-chain oriented model that allowed companies to move all their manufacturing and some of their services to wherever it could be done the cheapest.Many people and companies benefitted from this arbitrage to some degree, though many regions have dried up as a result of this shift, because, for instance, former company towns where cars were produced no longer have the resources to keep infrastructure from degrading, and no longer have enough jobs to keep young people from moving away; brain drain can become pretty intense when there’s no economic reason to stay.This reality is expected to become more widespread, even beyond former manufacturing hubs, because of the deployment of both AI systems, which can be subbed-in for many remote jobs, like call center work, programming, and the like, but also because of increasingly sophisticated and capable robots, which can do more automated work, which in turn allows them to be monitored, sometimes remotely, like those Japanese convenience store robots, for a fraction of the price of hiring a human being.This shift is expected to be especially harrowing for teens hoping to enter the labor market in entry-level jobs, as responsibilities like shelf-stocking and product scanning and the loading and unloading of materials are increasingly automatable, as robots capable of doing this work are developed and deployed, and perhaps even more importantly, as systems that augment that automatability are developed and deployed.In practice, that means coming up with shipping processes and other non-tangible systems that lean into the strengths of today’s automated systems, while reducing the impact of their weaknesses.Amazon is in prime position to do exactly this, as they’ve already done so much to rewire global shipping channels so that they can deliver products as rapidly as possible, to as many places as possible. As a result, they control many of the variables within these channels, which in turn means they can tweak them further, so that they’re optimized to work with Amazon’s specialized automated systems, rather than just human ones.The company has stated, in internal documents, that it plans to automate 75% of its total operations, and it currently has nearly 1.2 million employees. That’s triple what it employed in 2018, and it’s expected that the automated systems it has already and will soon deploy will allow it to hire 160,000 fewer people than planned by 2027.Even though the company expects to sell twice as many products by 2033, then, it expects to hire 600,000 fewer people by that same year. And it’s so confident in its ability to make this happen that it’s already making plans to rebuild its image in the aftermath of what’s expected to be a really difficult period of people hating it. It’s planning significant branding efforts, meant to help it seem like a good corporate citizens, including sponsored community events and big donations to children’s programs.It’s also intending to frame this shift as an evolution in which robots are amplifying the efforts of human employees. Rather than calling their automated systems robots, they might call them ‘cobots,’ for instance.Amazon has contended that the internal documents in which these plans were outlined, those documents acquired and reported upon by the New York Times, are incomplete and not an accurate representation of what Amazon plans, and they said those branding efforts are not a response to hate related to their automation efforts, they just like spending money on nice things for communities.The net-impact of existing efforts of this kind, though, is to deplete local job markets where these big companies dominate, and to make the jobs that survive a lot higher-end, requiring more technical sophistication, often, like being able to manage and maintain these sorts of robots, which are skills few people currently have.Amazon’s backend is already very automated, powered by bots originally developed by robotics maker Kiva, which was purchased by the company for 3/4 of a billion dollars back in 2012. Amazon warehouse workers now work alongside all sorts of robots—though as seems to be the case with employees who survive AI-related firings, those humans who remain are often subjected to strenuous conditions and a lot of pressure to work long hours.In the company’s Shreveport, Louisiana location, there are more than a thousand robots working around the clock, and that’s allowed Amazon to hire 25% fewer human workers at that facility, while processing 10% more items. The plan is to further refine that model while also spreading it to other Amazon warehouse locations, 40 more of them by 2027, which is part of how they expect to reach that aforementioned 75% employee reduction goal.Amazon’s obviously at the forefront of this shift because of the nature of their business and business model, but other big employers, such as Walmart, are also pushing in this direction. Walmart officials have said they will have cut costs by more than 30% at facilities where they’ve been experimenting with more automation by the end of 2025, and they’ve already cut those costs by 20% at these facilities, in part because fewer human employees are necessary.All of which is interesting in part because these are clearly real innovations that are leading to more efficiency and effectiveness at lower costs, and ultimately these may translate into cheaper goods and services for customers if the companies deploying automated technologies decide to pass on those savings.But simultaneously, this represents a fundamental shift in the job market and overall economy, and if new jobs don’t arrive at the same scale and pace as they’re disappearing, or some other money-distribution solution, like a minimum basic income, doesn’t arrive in time, we could find ourselves in a situation, globally, but especially and most immediately in markets like China, which has far more automation than everyone else right now, and the US—we could have a situation where there’s just a whole lot of stuff being made, but not enough people who can afford it, because they can’t find jobs that will pay them enough to participate in the economy, which in turn could splashback on these automated measures in a negative way, as these companies’ addressable markets shrink.Show Noteshttps://collectivefutures.blog/the-infrastructure-of-meaninglessness/https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/20/meta-approves-plan-for-bigger-executives-bonuses-following-5percent-layoffs.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/technology/google-sergey-brin-return-to-office.htmlhttps://www.reuters.com/world/india/meet-ai-chatbots-replacing-indias-call-center-workers-2025-10-15/https://restofworld.org/2025/philippines-offshoring-automation-tech-jobs/https://www.theverge.com/report/806728/tech-left-teens-fighting-over-scraps-robots-taking-jobshttps://www.theverge.com/transportation/805471/waymo-robotaxi-winter-snow-weather-testinghttps://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-wants-strong-influence-over-the-robot-army-hes-building/https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/walmart-automation-supply-chain-cost-savings/747377/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/business/china-tariffs-robots-automation.html This is a public episode. 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• Circular Finance

  This week we talk about entanglements, monopolies, and illusory money.We also discuss electrification, LLMs, and data centers.Recommended Book: The Extinction of Experience by Christine RosenTranscriptOne of the big claims about artificial intelligence technologies, including but not limited to LLM-based generative AI tech, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, is that they will serve as universal amplifiers.Electricity is another universal amplifier, in that electrifying systems allows you to get a lot more from pretty much every single thing you do, while also allowing for the creation of entirely new systems.Cooking things in the kitchen? Much easier with electricity. Producing things on an assembly line? The introduction of electricity allows you to introduce all sorts of robotics, measuring tools, and safety measures that would not have otherwise been available, and all of these things make the entire process safer, cheaper, and a heck of a lot more effective and efficient.The prime argument behind many sky-high AI company valuations, then, is that if these things evolve in the way they could evolve, becoming increasingly capable and versatile and cheap, cooking could become even easier, manufacturing could become still faster, cheaper, and safer, and every other aspect of society and the economy would see similar gains.If you’re the people making AI, if you own these tools, or a share of the income derived from them, that’s a potentially huge pot of money: a big return on your investment. People make fortunes off far more focused, less-impactful companies and technologies all the time, and being able to create the next big thing in not just one space, but every space? Every aspect of everything, potentially? That’s like owning a share of electricity, and making money every time anyone uses electricity for anything.Through that lens, the big boom in both use of and investment in AI technologies maybe shouldn’t be so surprising. This represents a potentially generational sea-change in how everything works, what the economy looks like, maybe even how governments are run, militaries fight, and so on. If you can throw money into the mix, why wouldn’t you? And if that’s the case, the billions upon billions of dollars sloshing around in this corner of the tech world make a lot of sense; it may be curious that there’s not even more money being invested.Belief in that promise is not universal, however.A lot of people see these technologies not as the next electricity, but maybe the next smartphone, or perhaps the next SUV.Smartphones changed a whole lot about society too, but they’re hardly the same groundbreaking, omni-powerful upgrade that electricity represents.SUVs, too, flogged sales for flailing car companies, boosting their revenues at a moment in which they desperately needed to sell more vehicles to survive. But they were just another, more popular model of what already came before. There’s a chance AI will be similar to that: better software than came before, for some people’s use-cases—but not revolutionary, not groundbreaking even on the scale of pocketable phone-computers.What I’d like to talk about today are the peculiar economics that seem to be playing a role in the AI boom, and why many analysts and financial experts are eyeballing these economics warily, worrying about what they maybe represent, and possibly portend.—The term ‘exuberance,’ in the context of markets, refers to an excitement among investors—sometimes professional investors, sometimes casual investors, sometimes both—about a particular company, technology, or financial product type.The surge in interest and investment in cryptoassets during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, including offshoot products like NFTs, was seemingly caused by a period of exuberance, sparked by the novelty of the product, the riches a few lucky insiders made off these products, and the desire by many people—pros and consumer-grade investors—to get in on that action, at a moment in which there wasn’t as much to do in the world as usual.Likewise, the gobs of money plowed into early internet companies, and the money thrown at companies laying fiberoptic cable for the presumed boom in internet customers, were, in retrospect, at least partly the consequence of irrational exuberance.In some cases these investors were just too early, as was the case with those cable-laying companies—the majority of them going out of business after blowing through a spectacular amount of money in a short period of time, and not finding enough paying customers to fund all that expansion—in others it was the result of sky-high valuations that were based on little beyond the exuberance of investors who probably should have known better, but who couldn’t get past their fear of missing out on the next big thing.In that latter case, that flow of money into early dotcom startups did fund a few winners that survived the eventual bursting of that bubble, but the majority of companies tagged with those massive valuations went out of business in part because their valuations were based in part on optimism, hot air, and illusory financials.Which is to say, their financials were based on a lot of money being added to their account sheets and tallied in the places investors would see those numbers, but the numbers didn’t mean what most people thought they meant.A company could receive tens of millions of dollars in orders, for instance, but that money and those orders might never be received and fulfilled, or that money might be mostly illusory: maybe it was borrowed from another company to spend on advertising, and that money would then go right back out the door, to the company from which it was borrowed, to pay for their ad services.That kind of arrangement could be beneficial, as the company doing the borrowing might give up a relatively small number of shares in exchange for money, which looks good on its balance sheet, especially if the money is given at a high valuation, even if that money was mostly just a loan from a company providing ad services, with the full knowledge that money would then be spent on their own ad services. And the ad company giving the money could usually afford to buy in at a high valuation, because it knows it will get that money right back, and when it does, it will get to record that money as income on its own balance sheets.So Company A gets millions of dollars from Company B, that money is then paid to Company B for some type of service, and both companies get to record favorable figures on their accounting sheets, as if real sales took place and real outside money changed hands, despite it being a circular move, with very little or no actual value being created.These sorts of relationships are also often good for investors in companies that do this sort of thing, because it makes their investments, the companies they’ve bought into, look even more valuable.Check it out, Company A, which I own shares in, is worth more than it was last month because of all the business it’s conducting, and because this other company bought into it at a higher price per share than I paid! Even though that increase in valuation is predicated on circular financing, the numbers still go up, and they go up for everyone involved, so there’s little reason to crack down on this not illegal, but shady behavior, and even less reason to want anyone else to know about it, because then they might not add their own money to the circular money-cycling, number-increasing machine.The major concern amongst some analysts right now is that the AI boom, especially in the United States, might be essentially this kind of circular cycle, but much larger than previous versions of the same.In the US right now, investment in AI infrastructure like data centers accounts for a huge portion of overall growth—the numbers vary, depending on who you ask and what numbers they look at, but some say that about 90% of total US economic growth, and around 80% of US stock market growth, are predicated on these sorts of investments this past year. Without these investments, the US economy would be basically flat, or worse, and the US stock market would be flailing as well.This situation isn’t ideal whatever the specifics, as too much reliance on just one industry, or one small collection of industries dominated by just a handful of companies and their investors, makes for a precarious financial foundation.If anything goes wrong with just one company, the whole house of cards could collapse. And if anything goes wrong with the industry, things could get even worse, and fast. All that investment, all that construction, all those employees and all that money sloshing around could disappear, could stop being spent, could make all those numbers fall and fall and fall more or less overnight.If this industry is in fact in a bubble, and if it’s being propped up by this kind of circular financing, where companies are fluffing up their own and each other’s accounting books by rotating the same bundle of money and on-paper money from company to company to company, that would portend pretty bad things for the US economy and market, if anyone involved stumbles, even just a little.This is why recent deals between the biggest players in this space are raising so many eyebrows, and causing so much sweat to bead on so many foreheads.In September of 2025, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI announced it had formalized a $100 billion investment deal with AI chipmaker Nvidia, the latter expanding on its existing investment in the former. In October, OpenAI announced it was purchasing billions of dollars worth of AI hardware from Nvidia-rival AMD, and that it’s taking a 10% stake in the company.Microsoft is already heavily invested in OpenAI, to the tune of $13 billion; it takes 49% of OpenAI’s profits, and gets more than that until its original investment is paid back. Microsoft also accounted for nearly 20% of Nvidia’s annualized revenue, as of the fourth quarter of 2025.Oracle, another computing company which has become hugely influential in this space due to its investment in cloud-based AI datacenters, has a $300 billion deal with OpenAI for future infrastructure buildouts and access, and OpenAI’s Stargate datacenter project was co-funded by Oracle and SoftBank. Nvidia also owns part of CoreWeave, which is an AI infrastructure supplier for OpenAI, and which has Microsoft as a massively important customer.All of which is very…tangly. It’s an interconnected mess, and OpenAI and Nvidia are at the center of it, but there are a lot of weak spots, threads that, if pulled, would cause the whole thing to unravel. Which is why this feels like such a dangerous setup to many analysts right now.Consider that in 2025 alone, OpenAI has made around $1 trillion-worth of AI deals. A lot of these deals are plans to invest: commitments to buy data center construction or the use of data center bandwidth, or they’re financial ties with competitors, clients, and providers—companies that would otherwise be competing with, selling to, and buying from each other, rather than linking arms and creating financial and infrastructural interdependencies.Many of these deals are predicated on debt and what are generally considered to be over-inflated IPO valuations, too: money that isn’t money in the traditional, accounting-book sense, in other words. Numbers that make activity, use, and income for these companies look a lot bigger than they concretely are, on balance sheets, which in turn helps their investment numbers go up up up.This dynamic has become overt enough that many of the biggest investors in AI companies, and the heads of said companies, like Sam Altman of OpenAI, have said, outright, that it’s probably a bubble, and that a lot of companies will probably go under in the relatively near future. No one knows when, but it’s a good thing, they’re fond of saying, because that shakeout will kill off the deadweight, allow the survivors to scoop up their former competitors’ assets at fire sale prices, and the whole industry will be further centralized around just a handful of the best and the most impactful, just like in the post-dotcom years. Monopolies and mini-monopolies, which, for the people creating and profiting from those monopolies, at least, seems like a good thing.That optimism glosses over what those in-between years look like, though, especially for smaller investors, employees who are laid off, en masse, and the folks who aren’t profiting directly from the surviving business entities, and who see their stock portfolios collapse and overall growth in their country decrease.Most of the stories in the tech world right now in some way tie back to the promise and concerns surrounding AI. It’s become such a big story because there’s a chance it will be the next electricity, but there’s also a chance the warning signs we’re seeing are real, and things will get a lot worse before they maybe, possibly, for some people, at some point, get better.Show Noteshttps://finance.yahoo.com/news/a-20-billion-clock-is-ticking-for-openai-as-microsoft-talks-turn-fractious-130006071.htmlhttps://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/circular-deals-bay-area-tech-21089538.phphttps://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/oct/08/openai-multibillion-dollar-deals-exuberance-circular-nvidia-amdhttps://www.ft.com/content/950e3a36-7141-4426-b7c5-08fad5d83919https://finance.yahoo.com/news/very-troubling-ais-self-investment-spree-sets-off-bubble-alarms-on-wall-street-160524518.htmlhttps://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/15/a-guide-to-1-trillion-worth-of-ai-deals-between-openai-nvidia.htmlhttps://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/this-is-how-the-ai-bubble-burstshttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz69qy760weohttps://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/openai-nvidia-amd-deals-risks-rcna234806https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-08/the-circular-openai-nvidia-and-amd-deals-raising-fears-of-a-new-tech-bubblehttps://flowingdata.com/2025/10/13/circular-deals-among-ai-companies/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/business/dealbook/openai-nvidia-amd-investments-circular.htmlhttps://sherwood.news/markets/analyst-a-lot-more-disclosure-needed-on-these-circular-ai-deals/https://www.barrons.com/articles/nvidia-microsoft-openai-circular-financing-ai-bubble-5d9a4e7chttps://www.investopedia.com/wall-street-analysts-ai-bubble-stock-market-11826943https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/ai-may-start-to-boost-us-gdp-in-2027https://finance.yahoo.com/news/most-us-growth-now-rides-213011552.html 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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• Tariff Leverage

  This week we talk about trade wars, TACO theory, and Chinese imports.We also discuss negotiation, protectionism, and threat spirals.Recommended Book: More Than Words by John WarnerTranscriptIn January of 2018, then first-term US President Trump announced a slew of tariffs and trade barriers against several countries, including Canada, Mexico, and those in the European Union.The most significant of these new barriers and tariffs were enacted against China, though, as Trump had long claimed that China, the US’s most important trade partner by many measures, was taking advantage of the US market; a claim that economists tepidly backed, as while some of the specifics, like those related to intellectual property theft on the part of China, were pretty overt, the Chinese government fairly brazenly gobbling up IP and technology from US companies that do business in the country before hobbling those US interests in China and handing that IP and technology off to their own, China-born copies, claims about a trade deficit were less clear-cut—most of those sorts of claims seemed to be the result of a misunderstanding about how international trade works.That said, Trump had made a protectionist stance part of his platform, so he kicked off his administration by imposing a package of targeted tariffs against specific product categories from China, including things like solar panels and washing machines. Those were followed by more tariffs on steel and aluminum—from a lot of countries, not just China—and this implementation of trade barriers between the US and long-time trade partners, which had mostly enjoyed barrier-free trade up till that point, kicked off a trade war, with the Trump administration announcing, out of nowhere, new tariffs or limitations, and the country on the pointy end of that new declaration announcing their own counter, usually something the US sells to their country, while in the background, both countries tried to negotiate new trade terms on the down-low.There was a lot of tit-for-tatting in those first couple years of the first Trump administration, and they led to a lot of negotiations between the US government and these foreign governments, which in turn led to the lifting of many such barriers, though the weaponization of barriers continued, with the administration, for instance, announcing a tariff on all imports from Mexico until the Mexican government was able to halt all illegal immigration coming into the US; negotiation ended that threat, too, but this early salvo upset a lot of the US’s long-time allies, while also making it clear that Trump intended to open negotiations with these sorts of threats, whenever possible—which had the knock-on effect of everyone taking the threats pretty seriously, as they were often incredibly dangerous to specific industries, while also taking them less seriously because it was obvious they were intended to be a negotiating tactic.When Trump left office, a bunch of international relationships had been scarred by this approach to trade deals, and when Biden replaced him, he dropped most of the new tariffs against long-time allies, but kept most of the China tariffs in place, especially those related to green technologies like electric vehicles and semiconductors, the local-made versions of which were becoming a big focus for the Biden administration. The administration then went on to expand upon those tariffs, against China, in some cases.What I’d like to talk about today is how this approach to trade protectionism and negotiation has ballooned under the second Trump administration, and what a new threat against China by Trump might mean for how the relationship between these two countries evolves, moving forward.—Trump’s second administration opened with an executive order that declared a national emergency, claiming that the Chinese were trafficking drugs, especially synthetic opioids like fentanyl, into the US, and that this allowed criminals to profit from destroying the lives of US citizens.This declaration allowed him to unleash a flurry of tariffs against China, first imposing 10% on all Chinese imports, then increasing that to 20% in March of 2025.China retaliated, imposing tariffs of 15% on mostly US energy products, like coal and natural gas, and on some types of agricultural machines, while also engaging in some legal pressure against US companies, like Google. They followed this up with tariffs against meat and dairy products, and suspended US lumber import rights, and disallowed three US firms from selling soybeans to China.The US reciprocated, and China reciprocated back. There was a period of spiraling broad tariffs and import bans in the mid-2025 between the US and China, which led to an aggregate baseline tariff on Chinese imports of 104%, which was followed with an aggregate Chinese baseline tariff against US goods of 84%. The US then upped theirs to 145%, and China raised theirs to 125%.Again, vital to understanding this spiral is that the Trump administration made pretty clear that they were doing this mostly as a negotiating tactic. There were claims that they could solve the US deficit by raising tariffs so high that the funds from those tariffs would pay off the country’s debt, but that’s generally not considered to be realistic. Instead, the consensus view is that Trump likes to play negotiating hardball, likes to step into negotiations with the upper-hand, being able to say, give me what I want and I’ll reduce the pain you’re experiencing, basically, and this play against China was another attempt to make that kind of advantage stick.China, for its part, seemed like it was done with the posturing at that point, though: it announced, after its retaliatory tariffs reached 125%, that it would simply ignore all further increases on the US government’s side, because the whole thing is just kind of a joke and it’s beneath them to keep playing this game.Not long after that, Trump announced that the tariffs against China would come down substantially, but not to zero; Trump said this was decided after discussions with China, and Chinese officials said they hadn’t been in contact with the Trump administration about any of this—which is something that seems to happen quite a bit with the Trump administration.During this period of spiraling trade barriers, China was able to establish better and more open trade agreements with other nations in Southeast Asia, including South Korea and Japan. China also reduced it US Treasury holdings, reducing its exposure to the US economy at a moment in which the US government was betting big on policy that many economists considered to be ham-handed at best, completely nonsensical, delusional, and harmful at worst.During that spiral, before things cooled off, China also began applying protections on locally sourced and refined rare earths, which are a category of mineral that are vital for modern electronics and things like solar panels, batteries, semiconductors, and electric vehicles.China makes and owns the rights to the vast majority of the current global supply of these materials, mining about 70% of them and controlling about 90% of global processing. And cutting them off, or even truncating their flow, is considered to be a huge strategic threat. The US has been slowly investing in alternative supplies for such things, but many of them are difficult or expensive to produce in the proper volume, and it’ll likely be a decade or more before those alternative sources can be properly exploited, replacing the volume currently imported from China.Back in June, China granted permits to US businesses that would be allowed to import rare earths, but that supply remained tenuous—a bit of a counter to Trump’s ongoing tariff threats that could seemingly arise out of nowhere, messing up everyone’s plans. The Chinese seemed to want to leverage this supply in the same way, and keeping things limited while issuing a few permits meant the flow could kind of continue, but could also be slowed or cut off, again, at a moment’s notice.In early October, the Chinese government announced new curbs on the export of rare earths and related technologies, just three weeks before a scheduled meeting between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. These new curbs further limited what could be imported to the US, even if there were intermediary nations involved, and also tightened their grip on anything related to mining, smelting, recycling, and producing products, like powerful magnets, from such materials.It’s worth mentioning here, too, that these sorts of materials are increasingly vital for the production of high-tech military goods. If the US were to lose access to sufficient volumes of them, the US military would have a very hard time making missiles, replacing satellite components, building tanks and drones—it would give China a significant advantage, probably for years, in terms of upgrading and maintaining their military hardware.Despite that, and despite the US government’s claims that it intended to replace Chinese sources of these materials, theoretically limiting Chinese leverage in these upcoming talks, progress in that department has been minimal, so far; about a billion dollars worth of investment in rare earths supply chains were announced over the past year or so, but further investment is considered to be unlikely in the near-future, and it’ll be a while before these investments will pay off, if they ever do.Shortly after that announcement by the Chinese, President Trump threatened to enforce a new 100% tariff on Chinese imports, beginning on November 1, or potentially even sooner, raising tariff levels to just shy of what they were back in April of 2025, at the peak of the US-China trade protectionism threat-spiral.He also said he didn’t see any reason to meet with Xi if they were going to limit rare earths in this way, but later clarified that the meeting hadn’t been cancelled, and said that he set the implementation date for that new threatened tariff rate to Nov 1 because that would give the Chinese the opportunity to back down on their new trade barriers before they chatted.Global markets, which are sometimes a good barometer for how informed folks think these sorts of negotiations will play out, have been relatively calm about all this, though there have been some significant tumbles in the US market, including a recent drop of about 2.7% for the S&P 500, marking the worst day for the US market since April, back when the tariff threats last reached this kind of peak.One stance that’s become popular in trading circles over the past year is the so-called TACO theory, which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out; the idea being that Trump is never really serious about any of these threats, he just likes to talk a big game and then hopes the other side will feel threatened enough to give him what he wants during negotiations—but if they don’t, he steps back from all his big talk and quietly gives in to the other side, especially if they have leverage.Some analysts are assuming that’s what’s happening now, as evidenced by Trump’s own statements about giving China the chance to deescalate—giving them specific instructions for how to let things calm down, rather than making these threats and suggesting they’re permanent, or not giving the other side any rationale for why it’s happening.There’s a chance, though, that there’s some truth to the opposing theory that this is part of a larger plan by the Trump administration to create a new trade war that’s meant to dominate headlines and concerns for a while, maybe as far into the future as next year’s elections, all of which is meant to conceal other efforts by the administration, like the military occupancy of American cities and the administration’s vehement objection to releasing the so-called Epstein files, which allegedly contain many references to Trump and other powerful people within his administration, which in turn would further connect him to a renowned pedophile.The Republican-controlled congress has made a massive effort to keep those files from being released, and Trump has become well-known for saying and doing headline-grabbing things whenever something inconvenient for him starts bubbling up in the news.So while there’s a chance this back-and-forth will end just before those upcoming trade talks, both sides taking their fingers off the trigger, as it were, in order to make a deal, there’s also a chance elements of this will be spun into a larger narrative, a war of sorts meant to dominate headlines and conceal other things that the administration would prefer to keep off the front page.Show Noteshttps://apnews.com/article/rare-earths-china-united-states-trade-supply-chain-de92222cda02dc85064c697911c6dea7https://apnews.com/article/tariffs-timeline-trade-war-trump-canada-mexico-china-a9d714eea677488ef9397547d838dbd0https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3318694/china-cuts-us-treasury-holdings-third-month-amid-trade-war-debt-ceiling-fearshttps://apnews.com/article/china-us-trump-tariff-threat-trade-talks-cc4bd30c3b1bcf2eb2676bc0e66efba0https://apnews.com/article/trump-inflation-federal-reserve-powell-88358f4955fd86ef3c86f5e8e089e775https://apnews.com/article/trump-xi-tariffs-china-ai-642b042b1ebe1d1930eb93bf51943e3fhttps://apnews.com/article/trump-xi-china-cc47e258cfc6336dfddcc20fa67a3642https://apnews.com/article/china-earths-exports-trump-dad99d532f858f04d750d0b8c50e5ed6https://time.com/7292207/us-china-trade-war-trump-tariffs-timeline/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93United_States_trade_warhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_the_first_Trump_administrationhttps://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2019/us-china-trade-war-tariffs-date-charthttps://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/trumps-fresh-tariff-assault-threatens-chinas-fragile-economy-d0b3a00dhttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn828kg8rmzo 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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• Gamewashing

  This week we talk about Electronic Arts, 3DO, and the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund.We also discuss Jared Kushner, leveraged buyouts, and loot boxes.Recommended Book: Bandwidth by Dan CarusoTranscriptElectronic Arts, often shorthanded as EA, was founded in 1982 in California by a former Apple employee named Trip Hawkins, who also went on to found the ill-fated 3DO company, which made video game hardware, and the somewhat more prolific, but also ultimately ill-fated casual game developer Digital Chocolate.EA, though, has been an absolutely astounding success. It’s business model was predicated on the premise of selling video games directly to retailers, rather than going through intermediaries. This allowed them to gain more market share than their competitors right off the bat, and it helped them glean higher margins than their competitors from each direct sale, too.EA also established an early reputation for treating its developers really well. They were the first gaming company to feature their developers in advertising and to give them platforms, promoting them as video game artists, basically, and it shared the profits netted from those direct sales with these develops—which in turn meant all the best developers really wanted to work for EA, which led to a beneficial cycle where they created better and better, and more and more financially successful games.In the late-80s, they started deviating from this model somewhat, scooping up a collection of successful independent game development studios and deviating, at times, from the creative lead’s vision when releasing their games. They also refocused a fair bit of their resources on franchises, like the immensely successful, as it turned out, Madden NFL series, and they branched out into producing games for the console market, including the still-new Nintendo Entertainment System, in 1990.That same year, EA went public on the NASDAQ, the company got new leadership when Hawkins decided to refocus on his far less successful 3DO hardware startup, and in an interesting twist, the arrival of the Sony Playstation in North America caused EA to drop support for 3DO hardware in the mid-90s so it could refocus on Playstation games, which were a lot more lucrative.By the mid-90s, EA had an astonishingly large and successful software library, including franchises like the aforementioned Madden games and the FIFA soccer games, but also celebrity-tied games like Shaq Fu, and military shooters like Jungle and Urban Strike.By the early-2000s, EA was making exclusive licensing deals with the NFL and ESPN, in order to stave off newfound sports game competitors, and it was the only video game company to consistently make a profit, most others experiencing feast and famine cycles, with periodic wins, but a whole lot of losses they had to cover with the profits from those wins. EA, in contrast, had a reliable stable of profit-sources, and it thus had a whole lot of leverage in terms of attracting and retaining talent, but also getting big names and brands on board, for collaborative projects.What I’d like to talk about today is what happened to EA during and following the 2008 economic crisis, and how and why it recently became an acquisition target for Saudi Arabia.—In 2008, when the global economy was collapsing, EA suffered a bad holiday sales season and fired 1,100 employees and closed 12 of their facilities early the following year. Later in 2009, the company announced the firing of another 1,500 employees, which was about 17% of their total workforce at the time, and in 2010 they acquired a gaming company that focused on mobile games, which were becoming increasingly popular, now that many people had touch-capable smartphones, which brought hot new franchises like Angry Birds under their brand umbrella.On the strength of that acquisition and all those downsizings, in early 2011, EA announced that it hit $3.8 billion in revenue in the financial year for the first time, and in early 2012, it announced it surpassed $1 billion in digital revenue during the previous year, which was a huge figure that early in the digital media landscape. It used some of those profits to scoop up another mobile-first gaming company, adding properties like Plants vs Zombies and Peggle to their library.EA completed another mass-firing in 2013, dismissing 10% of their employees under what they called a reorganization, around the same time they announced an exclusive license with Disney that would allow them to develop Star Wars games.Their stock value boomed in the following years, as a result of those cost-savings measures, and those new relationships, and emboldened by record-high stock valuations, in the mid-20-teens, the company started releasing big-name games, like Star Wars Battlefront 2, with random-content loot boxes and other sorts of microtransactions.This did not go over well with players, who decried these in-game purchasing options as ‘pay to win’ mechanics, as players could pay more money to get better characters and equipment, and a lot of the content, even after paying for the expensive games, was still locked behind paywalls, requiring more payments to unlock that content. A bunch of gaming journalists cried foul on this shift as the game careened toward its full release, as did a whole lot of early players, and Disney complained, too, so by the time it hit shelves, the game’s loot system was substantially changed, but that whole controversy spooked investors, and led to an 8.5% stock value drop in just a single month, knocking $3.1 billion from the company’s valuation. As a result of that controversy, EA also became the face for a larger legal and legislative debate about in-game purchases and how it’s kinda sorta like gambling, from that point forward.Soon after, EA experienced a series of bad quarters, including a huge drop of 13.3% to its valuation when a major entry in one of their larger franchises, Battlefield V, was released late, and received very mixed reviews when it was released, which led to a million fewer sold copies than anticipated. The game was also lagging in terms of gameplay behind smaller, nimbler competitors, including then-burgeoning Fortnite.The company saw an overall boost with the surprise success of Apex Legends, and the COVID-19 pandemic boosted sales dramatically for a while, since everyone was staying home, which allowed EA to gobble up a few more competing companies with successful franchises, and they knocked out a few more successful Star Wars games, as well.In early 2021, Saudi Arabia’s public investment funds bought 7.4 million shares of EA for about $1.1 billion, which flew under the radar for most gamers, but that’ll be important in a moment.Later that year, the company experienced a massive hack, a lot of its data, including the source code for games, stolen and sold on the dark web. EA bought some more competitors, but word on the street in 2022 was the the higher ups at EA were quietly shopping the company around, themselves looking to be acquired by a larger entity, on the scale of Apple or Disney.In early 2023, the company announced more mass-layoffs and launched another internal reorganization. It gutted several of its most popular gaming sub-brands, including BioWare, it cancelled an upcoming Star Wars game, and it announced that it would be shifting away from licensing agreements and refocusing on EA-owned IP.The pattern of layoffs leading to better financial fortunes didn’t pay off this time, though. In early 2025, EA divulged that it expected to underperform in the coming year, several of its big-name titles not doing as well as expected; the company cast blame on the market, but players and journalists pointed at the company’s gutting of its big-name studios, and the firing of many of its veteran developers to explain the reduced sales.EA had another mass-firing in April of this year, and followed by another in May, which paralleled an announcement that they would no longer be moving forward with a big, planned Black Panther game.In late September of 2025, EA announced that it had reached a deal, worth $55 billion, to go private, no longer selling shares on the stock market, with the financial assistance of a group of investors, which included Affinity Partners, which is led by Jared Kushner, US President Trump’s son-in-law, Silver Lake, which is a US-based private equity firm that helps make these sorts of big sales happen, and the aforementioned Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund.This deal isn’t done yet, it still needs to get regulatory approval and a successful vote by stockholders, but it seems likely to go through, since the US regulatory environment is pretty lax at the moment, and because Kushner is involved, it’s unlikely President Trump will take a personal disliking to it.But the big story here seems to be that Saudi Arabia is buying up not just a video game company, but one of the biggest and most successful video gaming companies in the world, which, although it’s lost a lot of fan-credibility over the years, still owns some massively influential intellectual property and has just a stunning number of relationships and connections throughout the media world, alongside its huge valuation.If the sale does go through, and we should know for sure by sometime around June 2026, it would be the largest-ever leveraged buyout, which means the purchase was completed by using borrowed money that was borrowed against the asset being purchased; so those investors have taken out debt against EA itself, which is an increasingly common means of buying a large asset on the cheap, but it also typically burdens that asset with a simply astounding amount of debt which must then be recouped, often by selling off undervalued assets.When this happens to a newspaper, for instance, the buyer will often sell off the paper’s real estate and fire all their employees, to make money and pay off that debt, and in this case, there’s a chance that debt will be paid by throwing up a bunch of new paywalls and really leaning into those in-game transactions that nobody really liked, including politicians, back in the day, but which in this current regulatory environment would probably be allowed, and they would probably make some serious bank off of it initially, before players started getting wise and moving on to other games released by less predatory companies.The really interesting facet of this story, though, is the question of why Saudi Arabia wants a video game company.And to understand that, it’s important to understand that, first, the country’s Public Investment Fund is meant to help its economy shift away from purely extractive resources, like oil, and it has thus invested in all sorts of things, including luxury beach resorts, minority stakes in financial service companies like Citigroup, stakes in companies like Disney and Boeing and Meta, and increasingly, investments in companies run by allies of President Trump, like the aforementioned Affinity Partners, which was formed by Jared Kushner.So this is an economic play, but also a political play, almost certainly, by the Saudis, to get in good with the people who are in good with the US government.It’s also been alleged that this might be an attempt by the Saudis to engage in what’s being called game-washing, which is similar to greenwashing, but instead of trying to make a company seem green and sustainable by doing kinda sorta green things, but only as a veneer to cover up the opposite, in this case it means using sports and video games and the like to increase a nation’s reputation with humanistic seeming things, despite, well, the truth being much more complicated.Just as when the Fund participated in buying a Premier League football, a soccer team, back in 2021, then, alongside their concomitant establishment of LIV Gold, a golf league meant to compete with the PGA, this investment in EA, and other investments it’s made in video game companies like Capcom and Nexon, might be part of a larger effort to diversify the nation’s brand, not just its economics. It’s human rights record is abysmal, and it’s possible they’re trying to cover that up, make people forget about it, by creating more connections between Saudi Arabia and more positive things, like sports and games and the like.There are additional concerns about this purchase of EA, too, by the way, because Saudi Arabia’s cultural values are very anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-liberal, democratic values. So there are fears that we might see less representation and fewer what we might call western values portrayed in the games released by these studios, as a result of this ownership.The folks running EA have said their core values will remain unchanged by the buyout, but it’s expected, bare-minimum, that this will lead to another several restructurings and mass-layoffs throughout the company in the coming years, to help recoup all that debt, at the end of which even the people making those promises might be long gone.Show Noteshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Investment_Fundhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/business/dealbook/electronic-arts-buyout-jared-kushner.htmlhttps://www.wsj.com/business/deals/ea-private-deal-buyout-video-game-maker-808aefechttps://www.ft.com/content/61cef75e-ceba-43ee-80e3-040756c6154f?accessToken=zwAGQAMTiJKIkc9hzvdezrpD7tOA4wQHVsYVTw.MEUCIHND3WOT4rS4frIMIOoeXHQeil_Ma1yGrwOqUD2m306DAiEAtA_QLvpyObai9zoo_9GZSljJuJyTKxJgFHpQDcCcVsE&sharetype=gift&token=03dd6ca5-c34f-4925-8a3d-a89f4058ee80https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/ea-silver-lake-deal-jared-kushner-c145cd55?st=eZghQHhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Arts This is a public episode. 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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