

10 Nov 2026 · 35m · 15 chapters

Live Kilkenomics episode with John Burn-Murdoch (Financial Times) on why hard work no longer pays, focusing on income vs wealth inequality, pensions, youth disillusionment, and AI’s effects on jobs (“jobpocalypse” framing).
John Burn-Murdoch, FT data journalist/economic columnist; background in data journalism (joined FT in 2013 as a data guy; earlier at The Guardian doing percentage/number analysis). Hosts: Nick and Jack (“The Best One Yet”); Mac and John (Kilkenomics live recording).
Wealth inequality “shares” (top 10%/top 1% ownership) hasn’t budged for ~40 years, but the ladder from middle to top is harder because incomes haven’t grown like wealth. This reduces young people’s security, contributing to lower birth rates and more risky behavior (crypto, gambling, retail investing) among those excluded from housing-ladder prospects. Pensions are a transfer from younger workers to older retirees due to demographics; retirees often receive 3–4x what they paid. AI mainly reduces hiring for new entrants (slower job access) rather than immediate mass layoffs; it also changes application dynamics (more rejections, less tailored CVs) but may make some entry-level work more creative.
US midterm “Blue Wave” implications; UK/Ireland vs Australia pension designs; France pension protests/IMF-bailout risk; “smart fridges” hacking story; psychotherapy as a human-interaction growth sector.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes.
John shares his journey in journalism and data analysis.
“Our guest today is, without a doubt, the most interesting financial economic journalist writing in the world at the moment.”
Exploring the nuances of wealth inequality and its implications.
“So I joined the FT back in 2013, like ancient history, and came in as a data guy in the secret of journalism.”
Discussing how changes in economic mobility affect young people's outlook.
“So the importance of your own earnings to determine your standing, your overall standing in terms of financial capacity.”
Examining Ireland's demographic changes and their impact on pensions.
“It's the pure uncertainty, which is a nightmare for most people.”
Explore how changing demographics impact pension systems.
“in the sense that we had five workers for every one pensioner.”
Discusses the financial pressure on younger workers due to pension systems.
“So if you'll permit a sales picture, next weekend's Financial Times, I'm going to have a big piece about pensions.”
Examines differing pension structures across countries and their implications.
“But this is not a universal thing at all.”
Analyzes how age demographics influence policy decisions and priorities.
“are going to be some of the things that policymakers and electorates are really going to have to wrestle with.”
Looks at youth engagement and potential for political change amid disillusionment.
“They abandoned the Republicans and they went Democrat.”
Explore how AI and market changes affect young people's job prospects.
“Yeah, so the AI jobs thing is really interesting.”
Discuss the changing nature of entry-level jobs due to AI advancements.
“But if you think about what your first couple of years in a white-collar job usually were, and it's true for me, I don't know how true it was for you guys, but you basically, you're just doing quite tedious tasks.”
Examine how AI affects career opportunities in the arts for young people.
“But that's quite a corporate, through a corporate lens.”
Discuss the historical context of technology's impact on employment and society.
“then the thing that signals you out is, oh, yeah, I know that person through that person through that person.”
Analyze the potential future job landscape as AI becomes more prevalent.
“To what extent are you comforted by that notion or do you think that that is a little bit naive with regard to AI?”
Highlight unexpected risks associated with AI, including practical implications.
“So yeah, in that sense, but I guess there is then the worry that there are all sorts of putting the economy to one side.”

Get the gist, explore an idea or ask about something said.
On The David McWilliams Podcast, what are the key points of this episode?
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.
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1:22To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. Hi there, John here. We have a really special episode for you today. We're just back from an incredible Kilkenomics weekend. Hence, I'm sounding a little bit rough. But there were over 70 shows and a lineup of some of the best economists, writers and thinkers in the world today. But to kick off the festival, myself and Mac recorded a live podcast episode where, as you might imagine, we covered everything from the Blue Nami in the US midterm elections, its implications for the economy, interest rates and a possible recession.
2:07But these are topics that we'll be coming back to again and again as they develop over Donnie's final two years in office. But in the second half of the show, we had the privilege of diving into the world of data and analysis with the one and only John Byrne Murdoch of the Financial Times. And we covered a lot of ground, focusing on income and wealth inequality, the looming pensions problem and AI and the jobpocalypse. But believe me, it's fascinating stuff and certainly not all doom and gloom. So I'll let Mac do the introductions. Our guest today is, without a doubt, the most interesting financial economic journalist writing in the world at the moment.
2:52there is absolutely no doubt John Burr Murdoch you will know from the Financial Times he is also and I think this is fascinating he just said to me on the way in he said what was your undergraduate degree? he said geography right? and this really interests me because he's coming not from the training that I came through this kind of narrow gauged economics training but training about geography how the world works what happens the interaction with people and environmental issues, and you put that into the economy, and that makes for the most fantastic economics column every Saturday in the Financial Times.
3:32So, ladies and gentlemen, a big hand for John Byrne Murdoch. Thank you. How are you? Thank you, man. John, let's get straight into it. Your writing is, as I said in the introduction, always more interesting than the average. I also know it's always regularly number one red in the FT. Explain to me just briefly your own background and how it comes that you are the FT's, one of the FT's economic columnists, but you're also the data guy that people go to data. How did that all materialize? Pure luck. No, I mean, I'm only half joking. So I joined the FT back in 2013, like ancient history, and came in as a data guy in the secret of journalism.
4:19This is less true of the FT than elsewhere, but it's the most innumerable place you can imagine. I always go back to, actually, before I was at the FT, I was at the Guardian, and I once received an email from a very highly regarded, a multi-award winning journalist, and the email read, I've got this number and I've got this number. Can you tell me what that is as a percentage of that? So that's how, I mean, literally, that is part of what explains my rights because the fact that I could do not only... This was before AI, clearly. I could do percentages, I could do multiplication. Carry the one in the long division.
4:53That's a bit of a stretch. But yeah, so that was my way into the industry. And then the FT is a fantastic place where people are given the space to develop their line of work. So for me, the major thing that happened was the COVID pandemic, which was suddenly something where the only way or one of the main ways to understand the most important story in the world was through original analysis of data. Like there was no such thing as a COVID-19 expert in 2019. So I was able to demonstrate as many other data journalists at the time did that you can break news and cut through and provide insight by knowing the right analysis to do of the right data and then writing that up.
5:36So since then, I managed to spin that out into a column. And then, yeah, for a few years of every week, trying to find, come up with an interesting question about the world and see what data, what answer data can provide. So John, you were thinking of one of the columns and you thought was really interesting. Absolutely. And it was the quite recent one last week. It was the one about income and wealth. And you were talking about where society and economy moving from income to wealth. But you also said that, you know, I was a little surprised at it, that you said that the inequality gap hasn't changed.
6:13In fact, it is even kind of narrowed in the last 10 years. Like, that doesn't compute with me. Because I always thought that it was very much the richer getting richer, the poorer getting poorer. Yeah. Is that not the case then? So a lot of this comes down to how we measure inequality. And I'm partly, when I say that wealth inequality in countries like the UK and Ireland hasn't increased, I'm almost setting that up to knock it down. So what I'm saying there is one of the standard measures of something like wealth inequality is what percentage of total wealth does the top 10%, the top 1 % own? And that percentage figure has actually really not budged in about 40 years.
6:54So to do like a little back of the envelope demonstration, let's say a generation ago, the average person had maybe 50 ,000 euro of sort of net worth, whereas some of the top maybe had 1 million. And you go a generation on, and both of those numbers may have multiplied by about 10. So now the average person, when you factor in things like housing wealth, has gone from 50 ,000 to 500 ,000. The person at the top has gone from 1 million to 10 million. So those shares, those relative values have stayed the same. And that is the number you will often see in the wealth inequality statistics, even from sort of left-leaning economists.
7:31But what I get into in this article is what really matters is to what extent can someone climb from the middle towards the top? And now if incomes had also grown tenfold in that period, then it really wouldn't feel like much had changed because you could still strive for 10, 20 years and climb up that ladder. The problem is, while wealth at the bottom, middle and top has maybe increased about tenfold, incomes have not. So that gap between 50 ,000 and a million, maybe if someone got a good job, worked really hard for a few decades, they could climb to a position of reasonable security. Now that is just completely unfeasible because that gap has gone from, what, just under a million to nine and a half million.
8:19And incomes have not kept pace. So the importance of your own earnings to determine your standing, your overall standing in terms of financial capacity. Income has become way less important, way less powerful, and wealth suddenly matters much more. So I think it's that point about even if shares, relative shares, relative standing hasn't changed, the ability to earn your way, to work your way from the bottom to the middle, the bottom to the top has become way weaker. And of course, AI is going to compound that even more, possibly, if we probably talk about the jobs. Definitely talk about the AI issue.
8:59But I think, John, what does that mean? So if that is the case, that again, it comes back to, you know, John and I've been in Dun Laoghaire in the 70s and 80s. and our mothers saying, you know, go to school, do well in your exams, put your head down, you know, and over time the fruits of your labour will come back to you, right? And that was something that all our generation grew up with and it was largely true in our generation. What you're saying is that conveyor belt has now stopped. What are the significance for young people, for politics, for the way in which, What I love about your articles, John, when I read them, I feel you're writing about the way we live today.
9:41You're taking snapshots of the world and you're saying, if this confuses you, I'll try and explain what is actually going on under the hood, so to speak. What does that sort of analysis mean for demography, for younger people, for politics? Yeah, I mean, I think it's just incredibly demotivating and disempowering. so as you say it's the story people were told 30 40 50 years ago that if you work hard you'll get ahead that wasn't a myth it was genuinely true you really were able to knuckle down get a good job and work your way up the ladder you were certainly able to get to a position where you had significantly higher living standards than your parents and now that is just not true like if i say that you used to need to work hard for 20 years and now it's 40 years what i'm really saying is it's not possible.
10:27No one sets out to strive on the basis they might feel okay when they're 65. You want to get to that position where you feel stable, secure, and a sense of status by the time you're in your late 30s or even earlier. You talk about demographics. I mean, we've seen birth rates, for example, fall steeply in almost every country in the world over the last 20 or so years. And part of that is because, again, the point at which a young person feels, I'm on the path now I'm on that conveyor belt I know that I can now make big consequential long-term decisions about family and about children because I've crossed from insecurity into security and now the point at which people feel that is just getting further and further and further away if people ever get there at all so it shows up in demographics as I say it shows up in consumption patterns like there's the share of young people now who are retail investors you know they are very much part of the story yesterday of falling u.s stocks there that is now hitting young people far more than it used to the involvement in crypto the involvement in gambling like these are all responses to a genuine sense that knuckling down and working hard is not going to cut it anymore that's just going to keep me in this position of precarity so if i want to go from here to there i'm going to need to make these big bets so it changes all of these things it changes how people feel it, changes how people spend.
11:53And as you were saying, it means young people are now actually much more exposed to the downside risks as well of these things that they used to be shielded from. So the gambling side of it is just going to make society in general, and not just the economy, but just more volatile in general. Yeah, absolutely. It's the pure uncertainty, which is a nightmare for most people. It's actually... Shh, we've got a lot of gambling ads on the podcast. Not anymore, Mac, not anymore. John is campaigning. No way. I said, oh, just take the money. It's fine. He goes, no, no, just the psychological impact. So now we have been exposed.
12:30So no more gambling. The last thing on the gambling, there's really interesting research that shows we've had these trends take off over the last 10, 20 years among young people. So it's the gambling, it's the crypto, it's the investing, it's more conspicuous consumption. So more food takeaways, that kind of thing. And there's a tendency to talk about the feckless youth. you know, what are these people doing? Really interesting analysis shows that among young people who have a reasonable prospect of getting on the housing ladder, those behaviors show up much less. So people who have this sense that if I do work hard, I am going to be able to get grab the bottom rung of that ladder and climb my way up.
13:07They are not gambling. They're not in crypto, they're doing less retail investing. It's the people who have made a rational decision that that is just not an option for me anymore. My background, my qualifications, whatever, are not setting me up to ever work my way to a point where I'm in even the top half of society. And that is the group who are on the gambling apps. They are throwing money into US tech stocks and all of that. So it's this trap. It is not a young generation who just have no discipline. It's that they are making rational but risky responses to the genuine situation they're in.
13:45And they're obviously exposed to the stuff I was talking about at the very top. Another thing you talk about, because again, I think that a country like Ireland is on the cusp of significant demographic change. We're going from a country that had the best demographics in Europe in the sense that we had five workers for every one pensioner. I think we're probably a couple of years away from that changing. and that's of course due to our birth rates in the 1960s and 70s due to the fact that half a million people emigrated from this country in the 1950s to England alone and those people would be pensioners now had they not but they're gone they have disappeared so that older generations 80s 90s have largely ended up living believe it or not Coventry Manchester huge chunk of them and And so our population is weird by European standards.
14:40It's been weird since the famine, but it's weird by European standards. But now we're tipping into something that looks maybe closer to the United Kingdom or maybe closer to some other Northern European countries. You've been writing about and thinking about pensions. Explain that because I find what you're talking about is, and it's all linked to a lot of chips being stacked against the younger demographic. Yeah. Absolutely. So if you'll permit a sales picture, next weekend's Financial Times, I'm going to have a big piece about pensions. Get it in. Get it in. Just cross it over for me. Just nodded it in.
15:18Available in all expensive bookshops and newsagents. But yeah, the pensions thing is just this seismic or glacial force that is just acting on everything at the moment. And as you say, Ireland is actually sheltered a bit from this because of those demographics. But you look at what's happening in France, but also what's happening fiscally in the UK, US, countries like this. I think there's just been this very long misunderstanding of what pensions are, which is that when you look at how they are actually paid for, pension payments today are paid for by workers today. We can talk all we like about sort of conceptually and narratively the idea that the pension is the return of your own contributions.
16:01But in accounting terms, in terms of who is literally paying them, that's not the case. Money in today pays for money out today. What that means is 50 years ago, 60 years ago, even 30 years ago, you had a lot of workers paying in and you had relatively small older populations. There were fewer people, people unfortunately lived less long. Today, you have a vastly larger older population. And in some parts of the world, we're starting to now see a shrinking working age population due to the birth rate factor. What that means is, when you think about this in accounting terms, the amount of money that people who retire are retired today paid into the system was much, much less.
16:44Because back then you had, as you say, sort of five workers to every pensioner. So the individual contribution from each worker could be much less. But these people are now receiving quite substantial pensions, while today's workers, your 20, 30, 40-somethings today are having to pay much more in their taxes and social contributions to support this much larger population. So the pension system is essentially a transfer of financial security from younger people to older people. And as that demographic conveyor belt, as we start going over that demographic hill, that becomes more and more and more true.
17:20So there's this bitter irony that an argument you will often hear from, whether it's in Ireland, whether it's in the US, UK, an argument you'll hear from retirees is, yeah, I'm just getting back what I paid in. It couldn't really be less true. That's such a diplomatic way of putting it. On average, retirees today are receiving about three or four times as much as they paid in themselves. Ironically, millennials, when they retire, because of those demographic forces, may end up receiving about a euro more or less than they paid it so so there are these massive forces going on and it just means as i say you've you've got a gradually widening sort of wedge of young people's incomes being taken away to support this growing older population and and it's such a thorny one to solve because it's no one wants to say or no one is really saying we should just cut the pension away from all the people but if we don't change the the way the system works and the ratios and the rates involved then you will just mechanically get to a point where so much more money is having to be extracted from younger people's incomes to support that older population it's just it's an incredibly thorny one and i think it cuts through so much of what we're seeing and feeling yeah prior to coming on we were we were having a little chat about pensions and stuff and you spoke about how differently the uk and irish pensions are the setup of them and that the way they work compared to places like australia where it's based on your income whether you need a pension or not yeah that's and is that what we should be kind of moving towards or i mean that's this is going to be the huge debate right but that is the interesting thing is you we talk about massive pensions crises like france being the obvious example but as i say there's flavors of it everywhere.
19:09But this is not a universal thing at all. There are many countries where this is pensions from the public perspective, from the treasury's perspective, that just incredibly mundane and nothing to worry about. I mean, in a lot of Northern Europe, what they've done is long ago said, because demographics are so important to the accounting side of pensions, we're going to bake all of this in. So as life expectancy increases, the retirement age goes up. if we suddenly ever fall in birth rates the pensions are going to grow at a smaller rate and that is baked in like a politician would have to intervene to stop that happening not to make it happen australia is interesting because they're also english speakers and a lot of the time we tend to think that the anglo the english-speaking world has particular problems but in australia 120 years ago when they started their old age pension um home ownership among older people It's pretty common.
20:04You know, this was an expanding sort of frontier country. So a lot of people own their homes. So right from day one, they said, well, a lot of our pensioners, a lot of our retirees are actually quite secure. They don't pay anything for housing because they already own their home. And maybe they have a private pension as well. So from day one in 1908, they said, we're going to pay out a pension to people who need it to escape poverty. For other people, they're going to be all right. So 120 years on, they still benefit from that. Australia pays less, a smaller share of its GDP on pensions today than it did a few years ago.
20:36Whereas the problem we had in places like Ireland, places like the UK was that pensioner poverty, people who had no income but were paying rent, was so much more acute when pensions came out that that was never part of the deal. It was always pensioner poverty is so extreme that everyone gets this. And now 70 odd years on, pensioners now have the lowest poverty rates of any demographic, any age group in the population. We're still saying, and everyone gets it. In the US, you've got households where people have$200 ,000 of income from their private pensions, and they still get the same pension as everyone else.
21:11So conversations like these are going to be some of the things that policymakers and electorates are really going to have to wrestle with. Because if you don't make these changes, you will be in a France situation where you're at risk of entering IMF bailout territory and you've got protesters on the streets every weekend. Now it's fascinating because again this is what you do so well you take all these issues that we're kind of all kind of slightly aware of and you make them concrete and you put not only numbers on them but also you tell the narrative like the Aussies have a different system because they weren't afflicted by the same problems as ourselves and I remember years ago, looking at demographics and how demographics change his policy and influence his policy, I was interviewing Tony Benn, the old British socialist.
22:01And like every good socialist, he had a very big house in Holland Park. And just beside Holland Park Cube Station, maybe the most expensive street of real estate in the whole of the United Kingdom. But be that as it may, right? He's next door to Richard Branson. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Wedgie Benn, fascinating man, infuriating, brilliant, frustrating, all those things together. And I was doing a show on TV3, and I was about 27, about 28, but I looked very young. I looked as if I'd just made my communion, right? If you'd put a rosette on the suit, someone would give me money. Still looked like that, Max.
22:39And Wedgie Ben was maybe in his 80s, and he was talking about policy and who makes it. And he looks at me and goes, young man, he said, what you have to understand is you and I are very similar. and I said and he said the young and the old one thing in common were bullied by the middle aged and what he was saying is it's middle aged people on their way towards old age make policy right and they make policy not from what happened to them yesterday but what's likely to happen to them and if you take that as I think quite an interesting starting point do you think that the youth quake that you're suggesting must happen will happen uh no okay why i i think again it's about the disempowerment and disillusionment there is and to the extent that we're seeing earthquakes somewhere like the uk it is for parties like the greens it is it's it's generally a it is a protest vote in a sense that it tends to not bring about change because it is focused more on expressing disillusionment, discontent, rather than voting for a party that has a legitimate chance of changing things.
23:54That would be my worry. I mean, I appreciate that's pessimistic. Like, we did actually see a big surge in youth turnout in the US. Yeah, that's what I'm saying, a couple of days ago. And a massive swing from, you know, we were told up until Tuesday morning that young white males were Republican. And they shifted. They abandoned the Republicans and they went Democrat. So, but do you think, because what you're saying is that the forces, and again, this is why your work is so interesting, you always look at the underlying forces. And what you're saying, these forces are incredibly strong and misfortune, unfortunately, or unfortunately, they seem to be kind of baked in.
24:32Yeah, and I think the problem will be, even with a youth quake, is again, for those same demographic reasons, the young population who have the strongest incentives to vote in a certain way is too small. that older populations retire the the portion of voters now who are retired is huge then you get your people in your your 50s and 60s as you say who are very much thinking about how this is going to affect them in 15 years so i do think it will need it it will need the youth and the youth may may deliver on this but it will need a broader a much broader section of society people well into their 40s i would suspect to say yes this system isn't working and we are going to need to be some of us at least are going to need to be a bit more altruistic like there are going to take france for example i mean in france everyone pretty much apart from seems about the rotating cast of macron's prime ministers everyone in france pretty much wants wants the pension age to stay as low as it is they want the pension to go up whether they're 20 years old or 70 years old so it needs everyone of all ages to just say, look, this system is currently on course to break down the government.
25:43It's on course to break down government spending. It's going to eat into public services. It is going to make lives and living standards for young people worse. And whether you're 20, 40, or 60, you need to be having that like wrestling. I think we can't rely on this happening simply because of a bunch of 20 and 30 somethings.
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27:51John I know towards the end I know you had questions about AI John and unemployment and because again that's into the mix we started there. Exactly and when you're talking about the youth getting disillusioned and leaning more into kind of gambling or gambling on the stock market or that kind of stuff you know that's compounded even more by AI and this supposed jobpocalypse that is apparently coming down the tracks. Yeah, so the AI jobs thing is really interesting. So a colleague and I write a newsletter about this every week, we've been doing so for a year. And the AI job loss story, it turns out it's at the moment, at least, it doesn't look quite like what we're expecting.
28:34So it's not so much layoffs. It's not firms saying, we've got all these AI agents now, so we're going to lay people off. It is firms saying, we're going to pull back on hiring and any pullback on hiring for whatever reason always hurts young people more because if you're 40 and you're in a job and a company stops hiring it doesn't matter you're in a job if you're 22 and you're trying to get onto the job market companies stop hiring you're the one who suffers so to the extent that we're already seeing this show up and i think we're still very early in what ai can do profession in the in this professional space we are seeing it show up as young people not getting jobs or at least taking much longer to get jobs.
29:10So that again, yeah, is compounding. And at the same time, you have all of these side effects of AI. So even if it's not taking someone's job, AI now makes it much easier to apply for loads of jobs. So you now have people who are sitting on hundreds of job rejections, because they've got these systems now that can help you apply for more jobs. But that means you get more rejections. It also means your applications are probably actually not nearly as tailored to the job that you used to. So the whole sort of structure around hiring and applications now has got much worse. But I mean, the one note of optimism I would add here.
29:49Please. Yeah, Chase, we need a bit of that. We're only starting the weekend. It's just one. I'm going to clear this now. But if you think about what your first couple of years in a white-collar job usually were, and it's true for me, I don't know how true it was for you guys, but you basically, you're just doing quite tedious tasks. You come in, you're an intern, you're a trainee, and you're being asked, pull some numbers, put them in the spreadsheet, or can you take my stuff and put it into a slide deck? It's those kind of jobs. Now, those are the jobs now that AI is good at. Now, on the one hand, that's concerning for young people.
30:25On the other hand, what seems to be happening is a lot of these, the firms in accounting, law, management, consulting, they're actually saying, we are going to hire just as many young people, but your job is now going to be much more interesting. You are now going to be getting AI to do that stuff. Management consulting was one of the areas people thought young people might be screwed. But actually, in the UK, last year, there's been a 10 % increase in graduate intake. And all those job descriptions for those 23-year-olds are saying, we want people who have their self-starters. They are creative.
30:58They have judgment, that kind of thing. So I think there's a chance that what we're looking at in 2025, 6, 7 is an adjustment period where employers and young people are figuring out what the hell does getting a job look like. But once you're over that, your job is then much more interesting. And you are able, as a 23-year-old, to get from idea to thing existing in the real world much more quickly than the old days when you had to spend three years making copies and slide deck. But that's quite a corporate, through a corporate lens. but then I mean one of the areas that I would kind of be more concerned about in many ways is the arts you know we have a horrendous amount of AI music which some of it actually is okay but when you listen to it for long enough you just realize there's no soul in this there's no human in this but that's music and then it's you know its impact on all sorts of media film and even the kind of painting and stuff.
31:54So there's a real disincentive for young people to pursue careers in the arts. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, the arts are increasingly a space where if you're not in the 0.1%, then you just need to be honest with yourself that this is always going to be a side hustle. And in a way that can be clarifying to just accept from day one, this is almost certainly not going to be a career for me, at least, you know, unless my parents are record company executives. I'm looking for a few of those at the moment. If anybody's in the record company business, my daughter's a singer, so we'll be very, very welcome.
32:31Well, I mean, funny you mention that, because, I mean, nepotism, I think nepotism is...
32:39It's an absolutely fair and equitable way of promoting familial wealth through the generations. Nepotism is back. Thanks for the fun. I was at an event recently where a 20-year-old in the audience said, you know, what tips would you have for someone entering this market? And I said, lean into nepotism. If you know anyone, because if everyone's, and I say this, I see job applications that come into the FT. If everyone's application now looks exactly the same because it's been either entirely written by or massaged by ChatGPT, then the thing that signals you out is, oh, yeah, I know that person through that person through that person.
33:14So anything that is related to what you've already done or who you know is going to become way more important. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I just ask you before we go, John? I mean, the history of humanity is that we are this very clever ape that has always used new technologies to solve things, to make life easier, to open up opportunities for us. So when, you know, the first ape, if you look at the opening of Space Odyssey and you have this first ape and he's grabbing a femur of another ape and he's using that femur as a tool to bash the other lad and this is why Kubrick was a genius. He's saying this is what the world will be like after the aircraft.
33:56Exactly, exactly. John will be getting fevers of apes around Kilkenny bashing me. No, but his point was that it has ever been thus, that what the key to humanity's success on this little planet of ours has been our ability to use technology and adapt to it and recalibrate and move forward. And always and everywhere in economics there's what they call the lump of labour fallacy, which tends that there's a lump of labour that's doing one thing and if a technology comes in and replaces those, those people will never do anything again. you know the evidence is that's not how the world works and that the world has never worked this way and it's kind of anti-evolutionary thinking to come back to our friend darwin mentioned at the start to what extent do you think that all generations agonize about the moment they see a new technology and because we're kind of more hardwired to listen to negative stories than the positive stories in our own evolutionary DNA, that we elevate the apocalyptic and we don't see, we're blindsided by the possibilities.
35:07To what extent are you comforted by that notion or do you think that that is a little bit naive with regard to AI? I am comforted in the economic, in the labour market sense. I do think it's very easy to look at a job and say, this job's in trouble because of AI. It's very hard to know what's the job that will exist in three years that doesn't today. I've got a couple of friends who've got jobs in the last six months that were only possible because of AI, that just wouldn't have existed otherwise. And there's also an argument, there's a Chicago professor called Alex Emass who has this argument that what becomes scarce in a world where intelligence, however we want to think about it, is just on tap from AI, what becomes scarce is human interaction.
35:50Like there is maybe a future where there are few people making slide decks, but there are more people putting on festivals, comedy economics festivals. For example. Always ahead of the curve. Always ahead of the curve. Look at growth sectors recently. Psychotherapy is a massive growth sector. Loads of people are retraining to be psychotherapists. That is a classic example of something that is all about human interaction. AI cannot really mimic that even though some people use chat TV to try to do it. That is a growing space. So it's entirely possible that what will happen is jobs that are about pure execution of brain power will shrink.
36:24They won't disappear. They'll shrink significantly. But there will be a lot, like a big expansion in these interpersonal relational jobs. So yeah, I definitely don't think we should. I think some of the anticipation of sort of double digit unemployment is based on a lot of pretty faulty assumptions. So yeah, in that sense, but I guess there is then the worry that there are all sorts of putting the economy to one side. AI is, you know, overheating fridges across Europe. There are all sorts of very weird and very unambiguously bad things that can happen. AI's do what? You've not heard this one? No.
36:57God, I've been reading books for this podcast, John. So it's all the fridges in European supermarkets, which are all connected to the internet because they're smart fridges. So now hackers can just take them offline and they've been just turning the heat up to 50 degrees. But they ended up throwing out hundreds of thousands of euro worth of food. Yeah. I did not know that. My God, things you learn on the opening gig of Kilkenomics. And the beautiful thing about this is that John Byrne Murdoch says that Kilkenomics is the future, which is so beautiful for me to hear. Ladies and gentlemen, we have been enthralled by John Byrne Murdoch.
37:40Thank you.
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