Cracks in the Edifice

In Conversation with Michael Power.

America is not behind on AI. It’s fighting the wrong war entirely.

Michael Power spent more than thirty years as a global strategist at Ninety-One (formerly Investec Asset Management), advising investors and governments on the shifting architecture of capital — his worldview shaped by questioning the assumptions most people take for granted, including the ones buried in language itself. When he traced the etymology of the word economics and found that both — despite one being Mycenaean Greek and one Carthaginian — converge on pasture, he built a framework for reading capital the way nomads read terrain. The trick being to always leave before the grass runs out.

It was that instinct — to search for the story underneath the story, to see the world from vantage points the West routinely ignores — that led him to China, AI and, eventually, a conclusion most of his peers had rejected. The US is building cathedrals while China is weaving a nervous system. And only one of those strategies scales.

Our conversation was recorded six weeks before Anthropic released new tools that spooked investors and hammered software stocks. Bloomberg reported nearly a trillion dollars wiped off in a week. Microsoft fell despite beating earnings. The market is now asking which companies can survive AI disruption — while Michael’s thesis about the cracks in the edifice plays out in real time.

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Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov