Peak Humans: Modernity Vs. Tradition

0:00David McWilliams: On the podcast today, the clash between tradition and modernity, we are looking at the most important maybe piece of economic data of 2026, which isn't about Putin and wars and oil prices and Donald Trump, it's about the fact that for the first time ever, the human population is falling. And what does it say about the clash between modernity and tradition, number one, and number two, where is that going to lead the human race. So it's economics, it's anthropology, it's history, and it's all coming to you from the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. So it's tradition versus modernity coming up in a couple of minutes.

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2:18David McWilliams: Before we start, Kilkenomics is on in a fortnight. That's kilkenomics.com in Kilkenny. 73 speakers, over 70 events, over three days in one fantastic city, the Marble City in Kilkenny. And of course, we have the Marble Sessions this year, which is basically music for nerds. It's bass lines and algebra. It's the fact that us nerds do quite like music. So we have a musical offering called the Marble Sessions, headlined by Cardinals on Saturday nights in the Set Theatre. Check it all out at kilkenomics.com. We'll see you there. To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast.

3:12David McWilliams: How you doing there? Time for the podcast. It's a very strange one today. It comes from islands in the middle of the Atlantic, well, off the coast of Ireland, a little place called Inish Mian or Inish Man, depending on how much... How much gargle you've had. No, no, it's the correct pronunciation. It's a very, very subtle thing. How are you, Ed? What's the crack? You've seen me and different guys today. I have and dear listener let me describe a video that I saw today. It was of a herd of cows walking along a little boring and they were all a bit jittery and anxious and stuff and then you look a little bit closer and there's a guy there who looks completely out of place with his aviator shades on and a shtick in his hand herding the cows and who is it?

3:59Your man. Mac, herding cows.

4:02David McWilliams: That was my son

4:15David McWilliams: I would like to do a podcast which means it's the price of houses and it's not simpler than the locals but John said it would be far too parochial to do a podcast. Just a little bit. All about Inish man and the problem with houses. Och, ma taa sima gut fwi coor si tiidi dan ilanik nae hiren feic er ma alt in the Irish Times last weekend, which is all about this parochial problem that John is not allowing on the podcast. He wants to go big. He wants to go global. Global, yeah, I'm global, man. I'm global. He's global. And I want to go parochial and rural and Gaelic and the Irish language and all that stuff.

5:06David McWilliams: But anyway. You're the ultimate city slicker down there herding the cows. I know. I looked really out of place. Rory, the guy who was doing it with me, who runs the amazing Inishman Knits, which if you want to see how a company can work in the most remote areas, have a look online at Inishman Knits. incredibly high-end knitwear exported all around the world from here this remote island in the middle of the Atlantic. Distance is no problem if you have thought about it if you're trying to figure out how to do it and Inishman Knits is an amazing success story from the western seaboard of Ireland of how you can using the resources here the history the heritage iron jumpers the knitwear, all that stuff, the weaving, the fact that this is what people did here for hundreds of years, using that, but selling your product all around the world.

6:10David McWilliams: Incredible design, incredible quality. And it was funny, Rory was just saying to me, as a result of the internet and connections with the world, you can amplify your message all around the world. And a little bit the way we're doing it here, because I'm sitting here and it's comma A, it does not matter that I am out on the western fringes of the country. So this is all about how modernity and tradition kind of clash and interact and influence each other. You're absolutely right. And that is what the podcast is going to be all about today. We're going to talk a little bit about what is going on in financial markets, Erdus, to begin with.

6:52David McWilliams: But then what we're going to do is we're going to talk about this clash of modernity and tradition. And we're going to talk all about the extraordinary and absolutely critical fact that 2026 is the first year in human history that the human population on this planet is beginning to fall. And it's falling everywhere. and amazingly it's falling most in low-income countries to low-income women. And this is a massive shift from what went before. So we're going to talk about all of that in a minute, John, but it's framed against the background. I'm here in an island off the west coast of Ireland. In our last census, there were 3 ,000 people living in all the islands put together, from Tory in Donegal all the way down to Cape Clear in Cork.

7:50David McWilliams: Only 3 ,000 people. An extraordinary fact to digest is, just before the famine, there were 48 ,000 people living on the islands of the west coast of Ireland. There are now 3 ,000. There are now 3 ,000. To be honest, Mac, I can't quite get my head around 48 ,000 people living on those islands because there's very little on those islands. You know, there's not even soil on half a Finnish man, you know? Well, A, there's not so much there's not soil, but there's no trees. Yes. And if there's no trees, you remained poor. Why? Because you had to sell whatever you had, fish, or whelks, or periwinkles, all the stuff that grew naturally here.

8:33David McWilliams: You had to sell that for fuel on the far side in Connemara. So one of the reasons the islands remained poor for hundreds, but I'm going to talk to you about thousands of years, is because they had no fuel. So whatever they had, they had to barter with the people on the mainland, or on moor here, as they say here. And what they were bartering wasn't sort of high-end fancy goods. It was peat. It was turf. Yeah. To heat them during the winter. But you know, originally, the Aran Islands were covered in trees. And they were gradually chopped down for fuel and also for building. And of course, once the trees went, then the soil was blown away.

9:15So the Aran Islanders, in their ingenuity, built up over generations soil by using seaweed and sand and manure and stuff and gradually building up soil so they can grow small crops and grass for grazing and all that kind of stuff. It's an amazing story.

9:37David McWilliams: And fachi, as they call them, potatoes. And I'll give you one last interesting thing about the Aran Islands. the famine passed the Aran Islands by. Why? Because the blight never crossed the sea to the islands. So the blight didn't affect the potatoes here, number one. And number two, they could fish. But as a result of that, one of the most extraordinary facts is that during the famine, the population of the Aran Islands increased, didn't decrease. And it's the only place west of the Shannon where the population increased. Through natural birth or people rowing over to the islands? No, because they didn't die because they didn't starve.

10:19David McWilliams: They didn't starve. Yeah, okay. Wow. They didn't starve more than they would have done. Okay, and that's what I want to talk about. Actually, it's funny you talk about years ago. I'll just give you one last little story. Before I was herding cattle today, John, I was going on my little walk. You were doing the sheep. I was doing my rang in a gala guy. I was doing my language courses, but I went for a little stroll to the back of the island and I met with a friend of mine there, a guy called Tarlac de Brockel, who's the father of Ruri, who knows an enormous amount about the history and the heritage of the island.

10:54Yeah.

10:55David McWilliams: And he brings me to this little field and he says, I want to show you something here. And I said, what is it? He says, come on, over here. And there was a little mound in the middle of a field. A lot of the fields are waterlogged here. There's a little stream going past this mound. And he said to me, he just said to me, He said, do you know what that is? And I said, what is it? He said, it's a fulloch fia. And a fulloch fia is an amazing thing, right? Fulloch fia. A fulloch in Irish means a little sort of place where you'd make a fire, okay? Right, okay. You'd create an indentation. And a fia is a deer.

11:30David McWilliams: And you'll know that, for example, fans of the Fontaines might recognise this particular word because I think one of the ravens was called skinty fia, was it? Skinty fia. That's right. Skinny sphere. Okay, so that was maybe a skinny deer, right? But this is about the full-up fear. And what it was, John, was an amazing thing. Very small. I mean, we're talking maybe three metres by four metres. Not big. But what that was, was they would build a fire. Now, this is Neolithic people. These are the first people to come to Ireland. This is Bronze Age stuff. This predates almost everything we're talking about, right?

12:02Right.

12:03David McWilliams: And the full-up fear, what they were doing was they would have a fire. they would then put the limestone rocks on top of the fire they would let those rocks burn to an incredible heat then they would throw the rocks into the stream that would then boil the water and into that they would throw the fia which would be the deer that they had just killed and of course that was how they softened up the meat and that's how they cooked this is what we're talking about five maybe more thousand years ago yeah making a stew Make it a stew. I have heard about that before, because it's a place in Wexford. I can't remember the name of it, but it's basically a history of ancient Ireland.

12:44And they have one of those. And the description is they used to boil meat, but they used to also have bats in that water,

12:52David McWilliams: but with the meat. And then you need to eat meat. Well, all I'm saying is that when you're out in these small places, you find, first of all, what is amazing, we're talking about tradition versus modernity. What you find, A, is that the depopulation of this area has been the fact. Nothing else really matters. That is the fact of the West of Ireland, and particularly the islands of the West of Ireland. And that has been the dominant sociological, economic, cultural, and political fact of the last 100 years. It's against that background that you have to look at everything, whether it's the language, whether it's the culture, whether it's poverty, all that sort of stuff.

13:35David McWilliams: So in order to survive out here, you have to fight against not only nature, but you've got to fight against depopulation. You've got to fight against also the stigma that was here of depopulation, because obviously a place that depopulated, as opposed to repopulated, was poor, felt itself backward. And all of that comes into discussions of the politics of the language and all that carry on but there are so many fascinating ancient monuments there's two of these big dunes here which again are they're bronze age stuff yeah we're talking thousands of years ago and it's against that background that i want to discuss john the depopulation of the world yeah absolutely mac but before you do that because i do want to get into that.

14:24But I do want to ask you about what's going on in the financial world. You know, we've spoken quite recently about how the bond market was competing with big tech stocks. But in the last week or two, you know, there seems to be a kind of a role reversal going on, where some of the tech stocks are beginning to falter and investors are shifting back to the bond market. Like, what's going on there? Okay, John.

14:50David McWilliams: So we were talking about bond markets the other day and how they were weakening and how they signaled, you know, dilemmas over the American fiscal position and inflation, et cetera, et cetera, right? Then suddenly this week, bond markets start to rally. People start buying bonds. You think, hold on a second, what's going on? It's all to do with the increase and quite rapid increase of what I would call AI skepticism. So up until now, there has been a sense that AI is going to drive the new economy. And all you need to do is kind of back that particular horse and everything will be fine. And that's whether you back the people who make the microchips, the people who make the data centers, the people who are accelerating the entire research behind AI, all that sort of stuff, right?

15:41David McWilliams: and this week people are beginning to think hold on a second does this and we talked about a month but does this smell and feel like maybe the railway boom of 1873 that yes the railways changed the world but there was far too much money spent on them and lots of people lost their shirts because what basically happens is you get lots and lots of FOMO in financial markets yeah and people try and get on the bandwagon. And what's usually the case is the first guy in gets paid by selling his stuff to the last guy in. And the last guy in is the person who actually ends up carrying the can because it is a speculative mania.

16:28David McWilliams: Because if you look at what's up to tech stocks and all these things, and we spoke about it last week and the week before. So this week, what has come to pass is a huge amount of reassessment of, hold on, can everybody make money on AI? No. Well, if everybody doesn't make money on AI, what's the chances that I'm in the camp that don't make money on AI? And if that is the case, what should I put my money into? And the safest place, even though over the last few months people have thought differently, is American treasuries. So your idea is the American government won't default. The American government is paying you 5 % per year for basically a credit that is risk-free.

17:17David McWilliams: And why should you bother chasing the AI market upwards if that market could turn, that equity market, even the bond market, which is attached to AI, because a lot of data centers have been financed by bond issuing. So there's a massive reassessment of the story. Now, that doesn't mean the story is over, John, at all. It just means that people are thinking, well, wait a second, should I just put some of my money into Safe Haven? And all of this is inconsequential to most people who don't play markets. But what is consequential is it gives you a sense of where financial markets think the future is going to be.

17:58David McWilliams: And it's that future that affects us all because that AI future is going to change our lives, our children's lives, their children's lives. And I suppose that's the takeaway. It's not that, you know, you and I worry about whether bond markets go up or down or AI equity goes up or down because the vast, vast, vast majority of humanity has no exposure to this. But it's at least a signal of where the future might be going. Yeah, I mean, this is the part of the capitalist system than I just find ridiculous because, you know, I don't have a problem with capitalism per se. I hope you don't. I'm the only lefty in the house.

18:41David McWilliams: There's a thousand Irish lefty podcasts you can go on and be shouting and roaring. No, but it's the way it works. It's this kind of betting mentality and the FOMO, and as you've spoken about and written lots about, is the psychology of money and how people kind of react to gossip and news reports and influencers. It's not exactly a solid base for a global economic system is kind of what I'm saying. But let me ask you a question, though. The long bond rate is at its highest level. What is it, past 6 %? It's at its highest level for decades. It has rallied in the last couple of days, but shoot. So how much of this switch back to treasuries is down to the scepticism in tech stocks as opposed to the increasing return for investors in treasuries.

19:38David McWilliams: A lot, a lot. I mean, I think I told you I bought a few bonds, French bonds, and everyone's going to run away from, and German bonds. Just pension because you've got to administer that yourself. And we're getting old, John, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I kind of thought, okay, look, what you're doing is you're trading off the risk of default, which is the apocalypse. with the fact that you're going to get 3 % or 4 % guaranteed every year, you get 0 % on deposits, zero. So if you put your money on deposit, in effect, inflation will erode away its value. Whereas if you go to what I would call the short end of the bond market, so out to three or four years, you're going to get paid in three or four years in full.

20:23David McWilliams: And in terms of you're going to get your principal back, You might even get more because the price at which you bought might have been less than the price at which you're going to sell in the future. And you're also going to get your 4 % interest rate every year. So that is just the three-year end of the French bond market, right? Yeah. And German bond market. So just take that as red. The UK offers you a good yield as well. The only problem for us is non-UK residents. If you've got sterling risk, that might bounce around. But the United States is offering, as you said, savers, the highest rate of return for decades.

21:04David McWilliams: And then the question is, is there default risk in the United States? And if there is, is that default rate so high that you might not get paid back in 10 years? So if you think the American government might go bankrupt 10 years time, then you're taking a massive risk. If you decide the American government will not go bankrupt in 10 years' time, that the Americans will get their act together, that they'll sort out their budget deficit, that they will have some sort of bipartisan agreement in Capitol Hill to reduce spending, to increase taxes, etc., etc., then you're getting 5 % or 6%, which is free.

21:46Yeah.

21:47David McWilliams: When money on deposits is giving you zero. So that's the argument, John. And then on the flip side, though, then you have the potential huge returns from, you know, the tech stocks and AI investments and all the rest. But because it seems to be run on moods and whims and FOMO and all that kind of stuff, the minute the cracks start appearing, which it seems to be in the last week, then it all starts falling apart really quickly, really quickly. You're absolutely right. And this, John, brings us to modernity. Yes. Because there is no greater emblem of modernity than the casino economy that you have described at the far end, what I would call the nether regions of the capitalist system.

22:34Yeah.

22:34David McWilliams: And what I want to focus on now is that clash between the ancient, the full of fear, the tradition, the heritage, and modernity. And that clash as seen through the lens or the framework, John, of falling populations. Because, as I said at the top of the show, 2026 is absolutely fascinating for many reasons. You know, we've talked about politics and economics and geostrategy and technology, yada, yada. But a moment where the human population is falling is a moment to be considered. Where is it falling? Why is it falling? And what does it mean for society? So that is where we are going, Joe. Do you know what, Mac?

23:23Let's talk about that after the break.

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25:15So, Mike, you're talking about, I don't know if it's good news or bad news or somewhere in between. But you mentioned that populations are falling worldwide. So we were up at a global population of around the 8 billion, which was beginning to strain all sorts of resources, whether it's fuel or food or energy resources or whatever. But now you're saying that population is falling. So that might be a good thing to relieve some of that. But the big question, though, is why is it falling? And where in particular is it falling?

25:52David McWilliams: Okay, so again, this is, you know, sometimes podcasts are framed in the environment of which you find yourself. And of course, the environment which I find myself here is in these islands where the population has been falling rapidly, giving the figures again from 48 ,000 to 3 ,000 in the population, the islands of the west of Ireland in the last 150 years. So that's the fact, that's the big sociological cultural economic fact of this part of the world. Now we might be seeing that this part of the world is not only a lagging indicator, but is a leading indicator that the world is going this way, right?

26:29David McWilliams: And it'll happen quite quickly. I want to say quite quickly, you know, we're talking a couple of generations, which isn't that long. So for the first time ever, 2026, humanity is now below our replacement rate of fertility, which means that the rate of fertility for the human race has gone to 1.8. That means that on average now, every woman in the world is having 1.8 children. That is no longer sufficient to replace the population that exists. the rate at which just so you know technically the rate at which the population of the world remains stable is a fertility rate of 2.1 so the average woman has 2.1 children at that level the rate of the world's population stays the same if it falls below that then you have a dynamic which changes and rising populations quickly change to falling populations and falling populations can become embedded very, very quickly.

27:34David McWilliams: And Bob's your uncle, you end up with a situation where large tracts of the world become depopulated quite quickly. So that is an amazing fact for 2026, John. So it was a bit like that song, We're Turning Japanese in terms of our demographic profile. I think we're turning Japanese. I think I'm turning Japanese. I really think so. But that's essentially what it is. Who was that? who was turning Japanese? Do you remember the name of the band? Yes, I do, Mac. That was the Vapors. Do you remember them? Oh, well pulled out of the back. Oh, no, it's... But I like it. Echoes of the early 80s there for our older listeners, right?

28:14David McWilliams: Yes. They were one-hit wonders. They were. So, basically, John, what we've seen is the most surprising fact is that traditionally populations fell slowly and they fell consistent with the increased education levels of women. So consequently, these things happened slowly and they happened in rich countries. And the supposition was that you need GDP growth in poor countries to trigger this process whereby the population falls because the population falling is a sign of wealth. And that was taken as read for decades by economists and demographers. In the last couple of years, we've seen something very, very strange, John, which is that populations are falling quickest in low and middle income countries which haven't got rich and amongst poorer and less educated women, right?

29:20David McWilliams: So the poorest people in the poorer societies are choosing to have less kids. So it means that the theory that you had to get rich before this population decline was triggered has now gone out the window. Now, this is fascinating. And a new paper, I'm reading a fellow called Adam Tooze, by the way, he's a very clever lad. I think he's a German lad. He has a very interesting substack and I'm reading his substack today. And this was about this particular issue. And he takes a study in America, which looks at countries like, for example, Guatemala. So incredibly poor country. Yeah. And he sees that the population there is falling.

30:00David McWilliams: By the way, this study has taken 236 countries around the world. And in 219 countries, population is falling. And in not one of these countries is it leveling off. So it means the population is falling quickly everywhere. And of course, traditionally, or what normally happens in poor developing countries, is that people tend to have more babies. and there's a higher birth rate, partly because of the high mortality, infant mortality rate. Is that still the case or is that beginning to change as well? Well, that's all part. It's all in the picture, John. It's all in the picture, right? But in places like Guatemala, in places like Latin America, certainly in parts of Asia where the population has fallen incredibly quickly, not only in China, but all over Asia, even Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, populations have fallen incredibly quickly.

30:57David McWilliams: Now, for years and years, everyone said, this has got to do, to come back to your anti-capitalist little dig there, this has got to do with capitalism, people are getting greedy, etc., etc., right? But this new study looks at this from a more sociological perspective as well as an economic perspective. And what they conclude is that modernity, the process of becoming modern, is inconsistent with populations growing. So what do they mean by modernity? This is the key issue, right? So they've taken countries like Guatemala, but this is representative of a whole host of countries going from the traditional society we spoke about that existed on this island 100 odd years ago to the modern society which exists now, which is why they're exporting high-end knitwear from this island all around the world.

31:48David McWilliams: Okay, that's a function of modernity. Now, what these academics mean by modernity, or at least they define modernity, is a society organized around formal institutions. So, for example, the government, the banks, the civil service, the tax rate, okay, those things, right? As opposed to societies organized around family and bonds of kinship and bonds of hierarchy like the traditional families. So again, out here, these societies would never have been organized about formal institutions. They'd been organized around informal institutions. So the community would get together and sort things out. There wouldn't be a big influence from Dublin or New York or wherever it is, right?

32:30David McWilliams: That's the first thing. The second thing in terms of modernity, they define it as specialized expertise where people become highly educated in specialized areas. and that divides the society between different social hierarchies, gives some people more status, other people less status. And again, this would be at odds with traditional societies where people had status that was actually inherited. So you were either the boss family, but there was no fluidity in social norms. There was no fluidity. You couldn't actually get up the greasy pole yourself, but now you can because expertise is specialised.

33:10David McWilliams: And of course, the other issues they were talking is large scale, what they call systems of coordination. And these would be like political systems, voting systems, etc. So if you take modernity to be formal institutions, specialized expertise, and large scale systems of coordination, what these guys are saying is once a society moves into this type of way, what you get is you get a change in perceptions of whether children are good or bad to have, right? Yeah. And then the second side, of course, is the economic side. And the economic side is a very, very rigid calculation, which is, you know, as economic growth becomes possible, it only becomes possible once, and this is a way of looking at it, that knowledge is codified, so it's standardized, it's accumulated, so we have education systems, and then it's widely shared through those education systems.

34:14David McWilliams: So therefore, everybody has a chance in the knowledge economy. So modernity, in a way, isn't another name for capitalism. And the interesting thing is that, if anything, history suggests the opposite. Fertility declined, for example, in this century, far more rapidly in socialist economies than in capitalist economies, which is an interesting idea, right? So Hungary and Czechoslovakia in Europe were the countries that first saw their population collapse in the 50s and 60s. Now that is fascinating. And they were very socialist. They were not market economies. And why was that? So the conjecture is that all of these societies have made children very, very expensive, particularly up to the third child.

35:05David McWilliams: After the third child, the first and second child, not so expensive. The third child, very expensive. Well, tell me about it. In terms of, yeah, well, you've got four of them, so you know all about this. And it's also these societies have made childlessness very cheap. Yeah. Now, that is something to look at. And again, this is a real economics way of looking at it, but you have to factor it in. Children are very expensive because the children now in these modern societies where they're socialist or capitalist, they have to acquire knowledge and credentials to get on, right? That means they've got to go to school, they've got to go to university, and that takes years and years of investment on the part of the family to get them there, as opposed to kids in the old days when they had to work at 12 or 13.

35:51Yeah, we'd stick them down a mine or up a chimney or whatever. But actually, what does this say about modernity going against our biological drive to have kids, the selfish gene and all the rest?

36:04David McWilliams: Now you have a fascinating issue because modernity, which is us going out to work, women going out to work, large-scale organizations with career schedules and career targets, and I want to be such and such by the age of 40, et cetera. Of course, what this does is this smashes into the biological clock, number one, and smashes into what would be called networks of family, which used to exist in traditional societies, right? Yeah, yeah. Where traditional societies like the grandmother will share in raising the kids, all that sort of stuff. So as long as you're all living together, then what you have is you have a network and that network makes the cost of the extra kid is shared by the grandparents much more so than in modern societies, number one.

36:56David McWilliams: And number two, of course, all women know this, all professional women or career women know this, that the biological clock starts ticking just at the very time where their career starts kicking into gear. So it's ticking versus kicking is what's happening, right? And of course, what this does is this changes the incentives to have children. And of course, as more and more women get educated and more and more women have the choice, whether to have kids or not, loads of them are saying, do you know what? Nah, I'll do without. But the fascinating thing is that is happening rapidly in poorer countries.

37:42David McWilliams: And that is a process that is new. Because we assumed that countries had to get rich before they got old. And now that is not the case. Countries now can remain quite poor. and if this data is anything to go by, they are going to get old and poor at the same time. So this is what we're seeing in East Asia and Latin America and we will definitely see it in Africa. Well, actually, just on the Africa thing, I mean, you've mentioned before about the population growth in a country like Nigeria is outstripping all of Europe's population growth. Yes, yes. But let me ask you the question then. Economically, what are the implications of this?

38:34David McWilliams: Well, you see, I am not, I think it's because I'm getting older, John. I am not one of these youth evangelists, right? I mean, ever since people in Ireland... You're a grumpy old man, in other words. I know, exactly. But ever since people in Ireland told themselves the story of Tirnanog, remember Oisin and Tirnanog? Every single culture has a Tirnanog fable. Tyrannog means the land of everlasting youth. Every culture has it. It's part of what humans always yearned, which was not so much not to die, but to remain young. The tyranny of youth, right? And that's an aspect of human society has been there for years and years and years.

39:18David McWilliams: People don't like getting old, right? And economists have grabbed onto this getting old and said, well, if we get old, we'd be less productive and we'll have higher health bills, we won't pay enough tax and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? But maybe we just got to get used to it. Maybe we've got to get used to it because the data says now we're going to get old. And societies that get old, because old people don't go out as much, they don't party as much, they save much more. So those sort of societies begin to slow down as the human body begins to slow down. I think to myself, John, that's not a bad way to go.

39:55if you think you know what I mean but then how but what about the services then like and and you know for your your ambulance that you'd be calling when you do your hip in and you know all that kind of stuff and you'd be cranking the temperature up in the house because you feel the cold more and you know all those kind of stuff oh this is John this is John's confession of an older man cranking the temperature up worried about his hip worried about his dodgy

40:20David McWilliams: me, we're at the back, getting out of order. Well, I think, John, we'll conclude here, right? If modernity is the dilemma, and it's quite interesting, John Byrne Murdoch of the Financial Times had another reason that he threw into the mix was the advent of the smartphone and the accessibility of the smartphone in poor countries, because he saw that what happened the data was after 2008, there was an acceleration of this process of the end of fertility. And what he's thinking is that, not that the smartphone is to blame, but the smartphone accelerates the process of modernity because it makes the world smaller.

41:04David McWilliams: So people in poor countries can behave like and see how people in rich countries behave. So all that. By the way, on John Byrne Murdoch, guys, there are a couple of tickets left for John and myself's hot cast, the top of Kilkenomics. And our special guest will be John Byrne Murdoch of the Financial Times, who is... He's always great. I think it's probably fair to say he's the economic commentator most on fire and most in demand at the moment. In the world, not just in the world of the FT in the UK or here in Ireland, but in the world because he is the man who makes stories out of data. He looks at the data, he interprets the data, he tells the story.

41:52David McWilliams: So if you want to hear John Byrne Murdoch and myself and John Davis sit in town chatting together, have a look at kilkenomics.com. It's at 11 o 'clock on Friday the 6th of November in Kilkenomics. He's also a great crack. So it'll be a great session, actually. lovely lads lovely lads so that will be a great session but it's also to do with or in the area that we're discussing yeah what is fascinating you asked me what's going to happen it could be the revenge of tradition John right it could be the revenge of traditions not because I'm down here looking at the full of fear like Lárit Gwélige and Márcín there it's actually got to do with the fact that if modernity is inconsistent with population growth And if we believe that population growth is essential for human life on earth, then ultimately what's going to happen is given that humans are the most adaptive species that the world has ever seen, that we may well begin not to march back, but to crawl back to tradition in a way in which people who have been beguiled by modernity, can't envisage that you know what we will do?

43:16David McWilliams: We will say, actually, we do want to have children. We have biological clocks. These are elemental desires that humans have. And you know what? If there is a trade-off between modernity, which is not just money, because it's not just capitalism, but modernity in all its various guises, and one can argue that socialism was by far and away the most extreme expression of modernity, that capitalism is more evolutionary and socialism was imposing from the top a perception of you must behave like this and you must change the way you've behaved for thousands of years and now you're going to behave like this.

43:53David McWilliams: It's actually the ultimate modernity. But the idea is that if that is the case, we may well be going back to more traditional societies, John, which may or may not be a bad thing. Indeed. Well, Mike, you better go off and milk those cows. They won't milk themselves. I really didn't have it, did I? I just don't have what it takes. Not at all. It takes. All right, we're going to talk to you on Thursday. We've got a fascinating discussion coming up on Thursday with Evan Solomon, the world's first minister for artificial intelligence. He is in the Canadian cabinet of Mark Carney. It is going to be a fascinating discussion, not necessarily about what we're talking about.

44:38David McWilliams: is things going up and down and bond markets and blah, blah, blah. But actually, what you do to regulate this new technology, we're going to talk to you all about that on Thursday. By the way, if you want to get this podcast early and with no ads, join us on Patreon. That's patreon.com forward slash David McWilliams. Join the gang.

45:19Hey, we're Nick and Jack hosts of the best one yet behind every episode. There's research, email, spreadsheets, and our shared Google doc, the headline hammer with Google workspace with Gemini. Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools. We already use like Gmail docs and sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle slash workspace with Gemini. That's goo.gle slash workspace with Gemini.

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