Why You Shouldn’t Be Scared of AI

Every generation has its bubble. Tulips in 1630s Amsterdam. Railways in 1840s England. Dot-com in 1999. And in each case, the story we tell afterward is roughly the same: irrational mania, easy money, and a crash that was obvious in retrospect. But what if that story is more complicated than it looks?

Aman Verjee has spent years studying the biggest financial bubbles in history, and the result is his upcoming book, A Brief History of Financial Bubbles. He’s also lived a lot of this from the inside. He started his career on Wall Street, joined PayPal in its earliest days and worked alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and has spent the last decade as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.

One of the things I found most surprising talking to Aman is his argument that these bubbles are not quite the catastrophe we tend to think they are. Some of the most transformative technologies in history were built on the back of financial manias. The crashes were real. But so was everything they left behind.

We also get into the question I suspect is on a lot of people’s minds right now: Is AI a bubble? I’ll let Aman make the case. But we cover a lot of ground getting there, including what the biggest manias of the last 500 years have in common, and what they reveal about the societies that produced them.