Samo Burja on Growth, Energy, and AI

So I actually think a big macro story that we've been exploring at Bismarck analysis and Bismarck brief is that the demands of AI are so massive that for the first time in decades, the economies of scale necessary to supply them require industrial revolutions in everything. So this demand shock, and we could almost call it a demand shock, arriving from the future in AI is going through silicon, but eventually, it's gonna reach things like mirrors and steel and natural gas. Mhmm. And once you're doing those things, oh, buddy, you've reignited the industrial revolution. Most conversations about AI focus on software. Samuel Boria thinks the bigger story may be physical. As AI systems become more powerful, the demand for energy, compute, data centers, chips, and industrial capacity is growing at an extraordinary pace. That demand could reshape not just the technology sector, but manufacturing, construction, energy production, and the broader global economy. Theo Jaffe speaks with Samo Boria about AI industrial revolutions, demographic decline, state capacity, and the institutions that determine whether societies can successfully adapt to technological change. We're live with Samo Burya. Welcome back to the situation room. Happy to be here. So we just finished our last segment talking with, Raymaw from China buzz about, was it I don't wanna get that wrong. It was Tech Buzz China. That's what it was. And Sofia made the point that, The US has these sort of, like, grand apocalyptic eschatological narratives around AI because we're a Christian society, and China doesn't because they're a secular society. Do you have any takes on this? I'm not convinced. Well, I I think that people, over index on long civilizational narratives and under index on just the concrete material conditions in a country. To give an example, there was the so called yellow turban rebellion in China in the third century. You could easily make the case that China has eschatological thinking and has end of the world cults. Right? The so called, yellow turban rebellion was basically a Taoist cult, and, it was a bunch of brothers that wanted to overthrow, an imperial dynasty. They believed the end of the world would come, that, you know, the the heavens themselves would change, and that there would be a massive, transformation into an unprecedented utopia. This was actually believed by many, many people, and it was very bloody civil war and likely one that ended up destroying, you know, destroying the Han dynasty. I think that people wanted to equate deep religious traditions with basically the beliefs that, a society holds, but they underrate how much those religious beliefs change on the century time scale or the millennial time scale. Mhmm. I mean, certainly, the, you know, religious landscape of The US has changed enormously in the last fifty years or so. I think that The United States is, still innovating in its practical religious sense. You know, you could say that, the rise of this kind of nondenominational …