Intro
Welcome to The Cameron Journal Newsletter. Each week, Cameron Lee Cowan wraps up the headlines with commentary, helping you navigate today’s media narratives. This week, we’re talking about the latest rumors about the Epstein list (that may or may not or might exist) and what is happening in AI.
The World is Hard, This is Not
Each week I send out the latest headlines, the latest videos from The Cameron Journal and commentary about the week’s events.
If you’re new here, my name is Cameron Lee Cowan M.A. MFA, and I’m the Creative Director here at The Cameron Journal. You can learn more about me on the about page. I do research and commentary on politics, culture, and the world around us.
Remember, The World is Hard, This is Not.
Update from Cameron
Welcome to September, everyone! I took last week off because it was a holiday weekend and I figured you could do without me invading your inboxes for a day and just enjoy a stress-free weekend. I enjoyed 3 days off, and I thoroughly enjoyed being able to catch up on sleep and not check my email for a while. I hope everyone had a fun holiday weekend. Americans travelled more than ever before this year. So I hope you did something fun!
I also want to draw your attention to the special report I have this week supporting my new book! America’s Lost Generation is out on September 12th (this Friday!) and I would like to make sure that you’re getting a copy, so make sure to place your pre-order now.
I am also happy to report that I’m going to be joining the Unleashing AI Summit, where I gave a talk on the AI tools that I’m using. If you’re one of my business leaders, influencers or content creators, you’ll want to get in on this summit! More information is coming this week about it!
It was a quiet week in the news, but everyone is still talking about the Putin, Modi, and Xi, summit. It appears that the US posture has forced Moscow, Mumbai, and Beijing to be get-friendly. I will say that Russia’s natural resources and China’s production capacity could be a geopolitical game-changer. There are already trading partners with $250 Billion of trade happening. China needs oil and Russia is close by with plenty of the stuff. India is sort of an also ran, but they aren’t dumb either. Modi sees India has being able to be a player in both the region and possibly as part of the new world order that bypasses Washington D.C.
In less serious news this week, the fashion world was rocked by the appointment of Chloe Malle to be Head of Editorial Content at Vogue, replacing Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour after a 37-year run. Also, and this just happened, Giorgio Armani died on Friday at the age of 91. I expect a teary video from Naomi Campbell at any moment (love her).
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Special Report: America’s Lost Generation
From time to time, I will come across something on social media that reminds me how Millennials got screwed over in 2008. In this latest edition of this, in the Tweet I just liked, they showed the great admissions cliff and how fewer college students there will be in the future, starting with next year’s class. So what happened about 18 years ago that would depress birth rates and lead to not having enough kids? That’s right: the Great Financial Crisis. We are living in the ghost of 2008 every day. The future looks rather bleak. We can’t go back and have kids who weren’t born. Some colleges and universities are going to face budget shortfalls and possibly closer in the near future because there are simply no young people to attend classes there. Combined with a general trend against higher education, and it spells doom for many institutions of higher education.
There’s more to this story and when I started writing America’s Lost Generation in 2020, I wanted to hear from real people and look for the narrative beyond the data. The book catalogs the story of Millennials and what went wrong for America’s largest and most educated generation. They did everything right, and they have been net losers in today’s America. So what happened?
I discuss that and more in my new book. America’s Lost Generation will be out this Friday on September 12!
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AI Isn’t Great: The Newsletter
The Headlines
Don’t forget to join me on Monday for The Cameron Journal Newshour to catch on everything happening in the world!
Only Democrats on the Epstein List?
We know (basically) for a fact that the Epstein list is expansive and covers everyone from politicians to business people, royalty (at least one confirmed) and others. But in this groundbreaking new video, the Deputy Chief Joseph Schnitt was caught on an undercover camera on a Hinge date bragging that only Democrats were going to be on the Epstein list because all the Republicans were going to be redacted. And he even said that Ghislaine Maxwell was moved to a lower security prison to keep her mouth shut. After this video went viral, The Department of Justice released the following statement, “Joseph Schnitt had no role in the Department’s internal review of Epstein materials. He has confirmed as much to leadership, and we plan to publish his written statement to that effect when we have it. In his words, the comments Mr. Schnitt made were based on “what he learned in the media” and he “has no knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Ms. Maxwell other than what was reported in the news.”
What is true here or not? Hard to tell, it is plausible that everything he said was mere conjecture. His own statement on social media expressed his anger at this woman filming him illicitly, which makes it sounds like he isn’t sorry for what he said but more sad that he got caught saying it. Even if it is mere rumor, it is an interesting rumor.
Labor Markets and AI
This week, I spoke to Ron Hetrick, he is a labor economist at LightScale. He normally doesn’t do a show as small as mine, but since my Nana (good morning) recommended that I speak with him, he agreed to be on the show. Long-time readers of The Cameron Journal will know that no one has influenced the development of this publication more than my Nana and my stories about her have been featured, especially back in the early days. In any case, his interview will be out soon, but the hour I spent with him was quite haunting. I’m not going to spoil anything, but our demographic problems are about to cause a shrinking economy, and that’s going to have 2nd order effects everywhere.
The other side of that story that I wanted his take on was AI. Ask any job seeker and you’ll find out the job market is basically non-existent right now. No one is hiring. The first print of the August jobs numbers were quite dire, with only a handful of jobs added in August. It appears that the uncertainty from tariffs has caused companies to freeze up. Pile on top of that the fact that companies are laying off due to “AI” and you have a situation where unemployment begins to spike.
However, one of the things Ron is seeing and I have seen it too, is the fact that AI isn’t really performing for companies in the way that they hoped and that the mass firings of people may turn into job listings as they discover AI can’t do it all. I found this thread on Twitter from a study at MIT showing that 95% of enterprise solutions using AI fail. This is due to a variety of factors ranging from budget to a generally organization mindset change, but the fact that AI is getting shoved into everything and not really solving problems is bad news for anyone investing into AI companies right now.
I’m going to write about this more on Linkedin but I am curious about all of this. Could AI be suffering from the Solow productivity paradox? For those unfamiliar, the Solow paradox is best summed in this statement which Nobel laureate Robert Solow made in 1987, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
The idea is that computers changed the world but didn’t change productivity. Some say this isn’t fair due to how services are priced and how the data works, but the paradox remains there, stubborn and unyielding. Productivity remained flat for the remainder of the 20th century despite major advances and technology, due to the unemployment it caused was somewhat deflationary which held inflation back until the Pandemic.
Could AI suffer the same fate? We will use for everything, but it won’t make us more productive in a way that we can measure. Or is AI just really bad at its job? It could be an awkward situation where it is somewhat both.
Harvard Scores a Victory but the Battle for Higher Education Marches On
This week, Harvard fired its opening salvo by winning a crucial legal victory in Boston federal court when the court ruled that the Trump administration illegally canceled Harvard’s research funding to combat anti-semitism. It will probably not be the end of the case. Columbia already settled for $200 million and it is obvious that the Trump administration wants to remake academia in its agenda but with this blow to their biggest level, this is going to get worked out in some kind of settlement or at the Supreme Court. But Harvard isn’t going down without a fight and I think the idea that they seem to be fighting back, at least legally for research dollars is important to defend the free speech and independence of American universities.
But there is another narrative working here. It is easy to criticize academia. They give us too many reasons. As someone who is over educated, I have my own issues with academia, and I’m unlikely to back any time soon. However, this whole funding ordeal has undercut important programs that save lives, and it has shaken confidence in the American university system. These actions will have repercussions on research and future students, especially international students, for years to come. Researchers are already avoiding American institutions and looking for opportunities elsewhere. That means innovation, scientific breakthroughs and more will happen elsewhere when they could have happened on American shores.
Ultimately, this will all leave us poorer in both knowledge and money for our trouble. All of this so President Trump can wage the ideological war that has been brewing in the GOP since at least the Bush administration (and really since Nixon). That’s today’s America.
Articles of Interest:
Keep up with The Cameron Journal Podcast and The Living Joke
The Interview:
The Cameron Journal Newshour:
We did not have the Newshour this week due to the holiday.
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