David McWilliams is shaking off the jet lag after his trip from Ireland to Los Angeles as he opens a Zoom call and logs on with Fortune. The widely read (and listened to) economist, with hundreds of thousands of followers on X and an economics podcast with claims to be Europe’s most popular, McWilliams is also, frankly, a very nice and affable man. He regales Fortune with tales of his adventures in New York City in the late 1980s, when he spent a summer working at the Red Lion on Bleecker Street, a job he got from “an uncle of a friend of mine.”
A Dubliner, McWilliams landed in the U.S. just 24 hours before talking to Fortune, as he was starting on a nationwide tour for the release of his History of Money, a widely acclaimed, international bestseller released in Europe in 2024. (In a blurb, Bono called it a “swashbuckling epic of grand sweeps and tight close-ups.”) McWilliams told Fortune he already sensed something different about America: “You kind of feel the boominess of the place, right?” He related his astonishment at getting in an Uber and being bombarded with a driver’s speculative initiatives. “Within two minutes, he was talking about the stock market, Bitcoin, AI, Nvidia, the whole thing. And I’m, like, driving down Sunset Boulevard with this guy, right?”
McWilliams added that you wouldn’t see such a thing in Ireland, and “the way in which finance permeates the society” in the U.S. is “very, very different” from Europe. “The universality of money in the United States is something that Europeans find fascinating,” he said, noting it was the same way going all the way back to the 1840s and the travel writings of the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville. When de Tocqueville arrived in America, McWilliams said, “his whole idea was like, ‘My God, these people are obsessed with money.’ Europeans were obsessed with other stuff, you know, hierarchy.”
And that is how, McWilliams, one of the world’s most closely followed popular economists, said matter-of-factly that America’s “boominess,” led by its piling into the artificial intelligence trade, is “undoubtedly going to crash.” Not only is it the case that “AI doesn’t create any jobs,” he noted, but the key investments driving the boom are rapidly perishable. The massive investment in graphics processing units (GPUs) is problematic, McWilliams said, because it’s “digital lettuce,” prone to wilting before too long. “You’re investing in something that is a perishable good.”
“Technological change suggests that if you buy a GPU today, the chip is going to be outdated next year,” McWilliams explained, adding AI companies are “investing huge amounts of money in lettuce, which is going to go off now,” he said, referring to his mother’s expression for when a head of lettuce, well, went off.
McWilliams was wading into a debate here that longtime markets watcher Ed Yardeni calls “the useful life debate,” and that famous Big Short investor Michael Burry claims is the tip of a giant iceberg threatening the whole market. Burry, in particular, has noted the lengthening of depreciation schedules as suspicious, with Big Tech not marking to market on their unprofitable investments in McWilliams’ “digital lettuce.” Ultimately, Yardeni wrote on Nov. 17, he does not believe this digital lettuce is due to wilt as rapidly as Burry and McWilliams say: “Data centers existed before AI caught on in late 2022, when ChatGPT was first introduced. During 2021, there were as many as 4,000 of them in the U.S. as a result of the rapidly increasing demand for cloud computing. Many are still operating with their original chips.” (McWilliams’s interview with Fortune took place before Nvidia disclosed its latest quarterly earnings, which seemed to assuage market fears about an imminent bubble bursting.)
Still, McWilliams told Fortune that even in the event of a crash, he isn’t too worried about the U.S. as the innovation center of the world. A big reason why has to do with his Uber driver in Los Angeles. And it’s a key part of why America is such a key player in the history of money.
The ‘iconoclast society’ and the secret of innovation
McWilliams has no time for most economics texts, describing them as just too boring for the general public. He said he’s “always thought that the key to understanding economics is to grab economics away from second-rate mathematicians and put it back into the realm of storytelling.” He believes humans are “hardwired to tell stories, we are not hardwired to explain the world through mathematics.” And defining money as a technology, like fire, that humans invented long ago and have shaped and reshaped through millennia, was the spark for his new book.
He describes how anthropologists and biologists refer to humans as a “pyrophytic species,” which adapted to and was constantly adapting along with the technology known as fire. Money was invented to function the same way, he believes, and that’s why he expressed confidence in America coming through whatever crash lurks ahead. He sees the U.S. as an “iconoclast society” at heart, driven by its chaotic—but ultimately innovative—nature.
McWilliams explained he sees Europe as a society run like an “insurance policy,” designed to mitigate risk, whereas the U.S. is defined by embracing it. He said he sees the innovation that produces something like the AI boom is a feature, almost a byproduct of this attitude. “Acceptance of risk is why the U.S. is much more innovative than Europe,” he said, arguing: “This innovative spirit is rooted in American history, going back to Alexander Hamilton, who established a great banking system and currency, allowing the revolutionary economy to borrow in its own paper within four or five years.”
McWilliams said the U.S. seems to understand innovation is “proximate”—the combination of small innovations, holding up his smartphone to the camera and noting it’s a proximate product, combining a phone, computer, camera, and telephone, “which Europeans would never have conceived of.” He used the metaphor of a hammer and a nail, saying a nail is not very useful unless it’s used in combination with a hammer.
In Europe, on the other hand, “the whole idea is you mitigate risk all the time, right? You go to public health, you go to public schools, you get a job, can’t get fired, all that sort of stuff.” McWilliams added risk for Europeans “is something that is taken by weirdos in the United States,” adding risk is “the defining psychological state of the American.”
Better marketing for ‘creative destruction’
McWilliams said a big reason his book has been translated into so many languages (21 of them, to be exact) is to get across the theories of the legendary Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter: Even though he was a “bizarre” character, said McWilliams, he “had the right idea, that basically, the economy is a large evolutionary mechanism, and the forces of evolution are the forces that propel innovation, and the forces of innovation are the forces that propel society and wealth creation.” When it’s pointed out to him that Schumpeter’s famous phrase, “creative destruction,” is a bit of a difficult sell, McWilliams agreed: “He needed a better marketing department, but his ideas were right.” (The Nobel Committee, based in Norway, offered a tacit endorsement of Schumpeter in 2025, awarding the economics prize to several economists who further unpacked the concept of “creative destruction.”)
Returning to the subject of a potential AI bubble popping in the U.S., McWilliams said he’s not concerned about AI companies growing “too big to fail,” a concern after recent remarks by OpenAI executives. The only real threat to the broader economy, according to McWilliams, would be if the AI industry successfully convinces the Trump administration that chips are “strategic assets” or a matter of “national security”—linking them to the military industrial complex.
McWilliams ruled this out, owing to political sentiment. He suggested that if President Donald Trump were to run again, his highly evolved “populist instincts” would recognize that being “against Silicon Valley is an absolute winner” electorally.
“One thing I’ve understood about America,” McWilliams added, is they by and large “don’t hate rich people … It’s the professional class they can’t stand.” The rich aren’t something to be hated in America, he said, because of the cultural attitude toward money: “Money is a great leveler.”
