118. AI Delusion with David Gerard

So hi, David.

Thanks, uh, for coming on the podcast.

If you could tell people who you are, uh, what do you do?

Hello.

I'm David Gerard.

I'm a journalist.

I've previously wrote about cryptocurrency a whole lot for a few years, and then I did what everyone else in crypto did and pivoted to AI.

When my co-writer, Amy Castor, and I, we noticed that actually all the people in AI, all the people pushing AI, were literally the crypto bros. It's not just the same sort of people saying the same sort of things, it's literally the same actual guys.

And if you really want to understand the AI bubble, keep in mind that Sam Altman is still a crypto bro with Worldcoin, his, uh, proof of eyeballs currency.

It's quite amazing.

Um, Amy more or less looked at her money and went, "Wait, I can retire," so she did, and, uh, but she still comes back to Pivot occasionally and does some very, very nice co-writes.

So it's not entirely me, it's just mostly me these days.

And we did it as a blog.

Now it is a YouTube channel with a podcast as well as the blog.

It's all three.

They're more or less disjoint audiences.

One...

People who like one just do not go near the others, but that's fine.

So basically, these days I'm a professional newsletter writer.

That's...

This is my living.

I used to be a system administrator.

I worked in IT for many years, uh, most recently at the British Medical Journal.

I finished up there in 2024.

So it's pretty cool, and now I just live a quiet life in, on the edge of suburban Glasgow, j- just a short distance away from the broad countryside.