Prometheus Abides

0:00On the podcast today, we are all over the place.

0:04David McWilliams: We are starting France with the fires. We're then talking about AI. We're going back to Prometheus. We're going back to Greek mythology because people are talking about the Odyssey. And we end with a quote from the Big Lebowski. What's not to love? Talk to you in a couple of minutes.

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1:23to understand the economy you have to understand human nature this podcast is powered by a cast how are you doing there it is high summer the sun is up the heat is beating down on john davis off air we were having a conversation about children if you are a man of a certain age you have adult children, you will know the conversation that goes around and around and around. There's no solution. There's no easy options. There's no blueprint. There's no way out of this. Our lads are not given a manual on how to be fathers of adult children. Anyway, if you are suffering from that and it's hot and sweaty and the family's a bit grumpy, we feel your pain.

2:10We feel your pain. John, you are in France. Speaking of hot and sweaty, you are very close to those fires. Do you know I actually have my feet in an ice bucket as we speak because I've just such an image I've just come back from a big such an image but yeah it's it's incredibly hot it's incredibly hot but we thankfully are not that close to the wildfires all the wildfires near us were kind of a couple of months ago but you know the back in Ireland all the talk is about Mayo winning the all-Ireland final first time in 75 years and all the rest and fair play to mayo but all the talk here the curse the curse john the curse is being lifted i know but all the talk here is about wildfires and of course it is and rightly so let me give you some figures because i'm doing a lot of talking to people around here and a lot of reading and in the local press and stuff nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated already that's an enormous amount of people but that's kind of that's kind of wartime evacuation Yes.

3:13Yeah, yeah. And I was wondering, like, where are they evacuating them to? And I was told by somebody that some of them are actually being evacuated to these fancy wineries, you know, the wine stores, bedding down in a nice wine store. Come on, I shall wash there. Can I be evacuated, please? And will Ciaragun doge the unposhed winery leather hull? But the size of or the scale of the fire in around Bordeaux is about 60 ,000 football pitches. That's how much has been burned so far. But they're also talking about the kind of economic impact and stuff. So obviously tourism. Tourists are not coming here at all, obviously.

3:56The infrastructure damage alone is phenomenal. know businesses closing all the rest agriculture lost crops all that kind of stuff but I was reading one guy and he refers to it as this is the cost of adaptation to climate change and while all those like this is going to cost France billions billions upon billions and all those billions that would normally be invested in health and education and social services and building productive economic growth are now being diverted to rebuilding and recovery of all these areas. And as you say, this is only increasing. This is only like climate change is only beginning to kick in now.

4:41Yeah, I mean, it's a disaster for France. The problem is that this is becoming every season event in the same way as those fires in the United States and in Canada are an every season event. And what is maybe most egregious about the whole thing is the way in which climate change has become a political football. And there's such an anti-scientific, because I mean, if you go back and you look at the United Nations stuff about climate change 10, 15 years ago, they were saying this is going to happen. There's going to be forest fires, the place is going to heat up, all that sort of stuff. I was talking about this when I was back in college in the mid-90s.

5:19And now, bizarrely and kind of unusually, the scientists have been right to almost a very

5:27David McWilliams: precise degree. So this is going to get hotter and hotter and hotter. And yet, if you take, for example, the US being a good example, but all over the world, you know, it's basically net zero versus populism. Populism has said, look, this net zero is absolutely the invention of geography departments, of biology departments, of environmental departments, of sociology departments. It comes with a whole suite of beliefs, and we're not for it. And what you're seeing is, of course, as the earth heats up, this sort of stuff is going to become the thin edge of the wedge. And the reason it is is because there's so much else going on.

6:03The other thing I was going to say, though, is that somebody else that I was reading there recently talking about GDP is the normal way of measuring an economy. We talk about it all the time. But now kind of going forward in this whole new climate change environment, you need to also build in the resilience of an economy and how it reacts to these massive crises and disasters. Well, I mean, the moral of the story is just live in Mayo, John. No, but it is interesting the way in which, you know, flows of people which have been consistently north to south in Europe during the summer may well begin to change.

6:44David McWilliams: They may well begin to change. Absolutely. And those flows will change the world. We are going to talk about fire, John. We're going to talk about fire. We're going to talk about economic history. We're going to talk about Prometheus. We're going to talk about Zeus. Oh, brilliant. And we're going to talk about AI because AI is not going away anytime soon. I was watching an interview with Elon Musk, your friend, and The Economist magazine the other day. Well, you know, snore, but he has a lot of insights into all things. But let's just put that aside. But obviously his entire thing is, we are creating a parallel structure of robots and this parallel structure of robots is going to change our world dramatically.

7:27David McWilliams: And we have no idea how it's going to work out. That's the key. We have no idea how it's going to work out. Are these robots going to complement us and make us more efficient? Or are they just going to replace us? And if they replace us, And if this idea of the generalized artificial intelligence gives these robots consciousness, feeling, independent thought processes, possibly even emotions. I mean, could this be the moment where humans actually end up replacing ourselves with a creature that is more intelligent than us? But the thing about AI and technology, I'm a big fan in general, as long as it's responsible.

8:12And I don't think the likes of Elon Musk is responsible. He's the guy who just wants to let it fly, see what happens. Himself and Peter Thiel and all those kind of characters. And I just think that's wrong. It's moving way too fast. Economies, traditional economies, whether you like it or not, they can't keep up with this. And this idea of move fast and break things, Economies don't work like that. Societies don't work like that. Well, I think we should do, John. We should go back to the wisdom of the ancients today in the podcast to discuss the impact. Okay. So I've been watching a lot of the stuff online about The Odyssey, the new movie with Matt Damon.

8:52Yeah. What's his name? Christopher Nolan's new movie. Christopher Nolan, yeah. And I've been thinking about The Odyssey as I've been walking around, John. I've been walking around the ancient Greeks. We're one of those big helmets on, I bet. One of those big elements with the big feathers on it, right? But I think what I want to do is, dear listener, I want to tell the story of fire as the absolutely transformative technology of humanity

9:16David McWilliams: through the prism of the ancient Greeks and the wisdom that they had about this very dilemma that we're talking about. What are we creating? And the wisdom that they had about that. And then look at what is the logical way in which AI, at least in its first iteration, is going to change the economy. But I think we have to kind of stand back and take a big, big view. If you had been lucky enough to have been at the Dorky Book Festival about six years ago, you might have listened to Stephen Fry talking about this. And it was amazing. I'm going to try my best to repeat the arguments that Stephen Fry was making.

9:53They are fascinating. But it's basically about the idea

9:57David McWilliams: that in ancient Greek mythology, the Greeks identified the killer technology that humans had that distinguished us from the rest of the animal kingdom as fire. That this shows amazing wisdom and prescience that in fact in Greek mythology they had figured out that the reason humans had got to or one of the reasons humans had got to the top of the evolutionary pile was that we had managed to tame this extraordinary technology called FIRE. And that they embedded in all of their mythology. And as a result of that, what they were saying is kind of careful what you wish for. If you acquire or if you tame or if you invent or if you conceive of this amazing technology, it can have all sorts of adverse impacts on you.

10:55David McWilliams: and those adverse impacts. It's kind of like the Frankenstein story, you know, you create the monster and then you don't know what to do with it because the monster gets bigger. So that's the framing of AI. And I think it's this notion that ancient, ancient people had wisdom, which is as germane for us now as it was for them then to explain the world, I think is really interesting. I actually do remember that session with Stephen Fry. He was on stage with Johnny Ive of Apple fame. But go on, tell us a story. Take us back to ancient Greece. So first of all, let's look at what we started the idea with fire.

11:33The fire that you see now is out of control. It is dangerous. It is terrifying. It is fierce. That very force, that very potent force is what humans tamed thousands of years ago,

11:48David McWilliams: tens of thousands of years ago. And that changed us completely. So in all economics, what we always feel is that the story of economics is humans acquiring a technology, combining that technology with something else to propel us forward. In a way, that's the story of human progress, right? Is that we deploy technologies. We tend to think of technologies as physical, but there can be other types of technologies as well. But just in the context of fire, right? So archaeologists, anthropologists, biologists, ancient historians, they've always emphasized how much of our domestication as a species was dependent on us taming this idea of fire.

12:29There's an amazing American anthropologist called James C.

12:33David McWilliams: Scott. He's written these wonderful books about, in effect, Adam and Eve's economy, the economy of the hunter-gatherers. And you don't conceive of the economy of the hunter-gatherers as an economy, but bear with me. It's really, I find this sort of pre-economic, ancient economic history fascinating. But basically what Scott goes on to say is that we are a fire-adjusted or a pyrophite species, which is a species that continually adapted to and was adapted with this technology, fire. That's his key insight into how we progressed. He said, our bodies have changed. We adjusted to fire. Our environment was changed by fire.

13:12David McWilliams: The animals we hunted and lived with were altered by fire. We were still maybe nomadic, but the range of our hunters and our gathering was made much tighter because we used fire to change the environment around it. Imagine, you know the way people come into a new house? And the first thing people do when they buy a new house is they rearrange the furniture to try and stamp their own authority, their own personality on a place. Oh, I don't like that couch there. I don't like that bed there. It's like a dog mark in its territory. Exactly. So Scott makes the point that we readjusted the furniture of the world by using fire.

13:47David McWilliams: And the point he says, right, is that we've been using fire for about 400 ,000 years. We know that. And it allowed us first to settle in various camps throughout the seasons. Like we have an image of the hunter-gatherers sort of mooching around nomadically with no plan, but that wasn't the case. The case was they moved from camp to camp and the whole objective there was to do less hunting for every bit of gathering. So the idea is exactly like we would do now. How do I do the less work possible and get the most nutrients, right? That's the human thing, right? I put my hooves up and then put my hooves into an ice bucket after my walk, right?

14:25David McWilliams: So the hunter-gatherers, they thought the same as us. They were exactly the same. They're like, how do I do this, right? So if you think about the early economy, it's more like an organizational structure. It's not like an economy, like with currencies and taxes, but it's a way in which they organize themselves. And if you think about the economy of the nomads, covered with forests, totally inhospitable, but those hunter-gatherers would have seen natural wildfires, like the one you're seeing in France now, cleaning huge swathes of forests. They would have seen, okay, well, that's much easier than chopping shit down.

14:55David McWilliams: If we can light fires, we can actually change the environment around it. And of course, that would reveal the hiding place of nests of animals that they could eat that were in this very deep forest, right? And they would have noticed how after the burning, vegetation change, you get grasses, you get all these... All new growth, yeah. So if you can imagine, the hunter-gatherers were observing stuff. And they were like, this thing, this fire is extraordinary. And then if you look at evolution, it's really hard to overstate how extraordinary the impact of fire was on us. It meant we could cook. Now, that's the main thing, right?

15:29David McWilliams: And cooking means it increases the variety of foods that we can consume because we can eat them because the cooking softens them up. So then once you realize that it changed the variety of nutrients we have, suddenly it begins to form the building block of the expansion of the population. Because in the past, we could only... If you think about what humans subsisted on prior to fire, it was raw animals and vegetables, right? Fire gave us a diet that was much easier to digest. In effect, fire and cooking does the chewing for you. And what does that change? It changes your jaw. And this is why our jaws, as you know, John, you've done all this stuff.

16:10David McWilliams: Our jaws are much smaller than an ape's jaws because we figured out we didn't need to be masticating all the time. And then cooking changed the way we were physically. It changed the shape of our stomachs, all these things. So this is the gradual evolutionary legacy of fire. What may be more interesting, I'm going to come on to Prometheus now, is that fire made us social. And that's, I think, something we don't necessarily look at. Do you mean like with people sitting around a campfire? Yes. And actually just having the time to talk, having eaten. Having eaten, having the time to talk. You'd be sitting around, you'd be flirting, you'd be giggling.

16:50David McWilliams: You'd be all around the fire. This was the whole thing. This is where we hung out. So we became a social animal around the fire. And this is why I think sometimes, you know, when you look into a fire, if you look into a fire late at night, it brings you somewhere different in your head. It makes you daydream. Well, it's kind of mesmerizing. Exactly. So if you think of what this would have done to us as social animals, we would have chatted. We'd have developed imagination. We'd have looked at the stars and thought, what the hell is out there? And if you think of fire as a time-saving device, all technology is a time-saving device.

17:25David McWilliams: I've always thought, right beside you is those, you know those fellows who painted the, where's that place in France? Lascaux, which is down the south of France. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fabulous. You can imagine those guys, they had fires, the fires to light the caves, to show them the things. And they're painting deer and they're painting horses and all these other things. And, of course, fire allowed us to begin to dream, to use our imagination, and maybe even, like, those guys, too, self-expression, like art. These people were creating art 17 ,000 years ago, and they were doing it around the campfire.

18:00David McWilliams: So what you see is this extraordinary change in human living and human experience as a result of fire. Now, we know that now because we have anthropologists, we have environmentalists, we have biologists, we have science that can A, figure out what we were doing back then, the carbon dating, but B, we have a huge library of human intelligence that has said this happened and that happened and this happened, right? Yeah. The Greeks didn't have that. This is what really amazes me. Yeah. So we have all this stuff that makes sense to us now given what we know about the world. That fire had this social, physical, community, psychological, emotional intelligence impact on us.

18:55But the Greeks wouldn't have known that. And yet they figured out, this is the interesting thing, in their mythology, that fire was the difference between us and animals. And that I find fascinating. But the Greek mythology was their kind of form of history in terms of turning their knowledge into stories. So it was easier to pass on. Easier remembered for a start, but easier passed on. And they can use analogies and all that kind of stuff. But explain the Greek and Prometheus. Well, again, what we're talking about, dear listener, and we've gone slightly off on a little sort of tangent. So in Greek mythology, the gods created the world first.

19:37So there's first gods, there was titans, and there was nymphs, and there was fairies, and there was this, that, the other. And of course, the boss man, Zeus, was the king. And in Greek mythology, Zeus used to hang out with a titan

19:52David McWilliams: called, who wasn't a god, slightly like sort of a second-rate god, not a complete god. Right, an associate kind of. An associate, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. An adjacent god, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like a trainee lawyer, right? A trainee god. And they were called titans. And these lads, the main one, are the one that we know most about. And the most famous one is Prometheus. And he was very good looking, and he was great crack, and he was a really good mate of Zeus's. And they used to hang out together and kind of fly around the world, being God, Titan-y type things. As you do. And then Zeus says to Prometheus after a while, he said, look, I'm really bored.

20:29I need to create a new species.

20:33David McWilliams: And the Titan, Prometheus says, how do you mean? He says, I think we're going to create this new species. They're going to look like us and sound like us, but they're going to be miniature versions of us. And himself, Prometheus said, that's grand. And off they flew to Mesopotamia. So this is like us playing with toy soldiers or action man. Exactly, exactly. It's the six million dollar man, right? The six million dollar man, right? With eagle eyes and gripping hands. That's the very man. The very man, if you have a memory from the 1970s, you know we're talking about, if you don't, lucky you, right?

21:05So Zeus says to Prometheus, let's create these little figurines. And they go, according to the mythology, to Mesopotamia, which is the Tigris and the Euphrates River, where the clay on the river was very, very moldable into little figures. Yeah. And there Prometheus and Zeus, and Zeus's daughter Athena, come up with the idea of creating the little figurines. And those figurines are little humans. And Zeus says, this is great crack. We can have great crack with these little things, right? And what would we call them? He'll say, we call them those which are underneath us, anthropods, which is where anthropology comes from.

21:46Oh, okay.

21:47David McWilliams: Yeah, so this is the Greeks' understanding of where humans came from. And again, imagine they're trying to answer the eternal questions of life. Where do we come from? How do we get here, etc.? And then Prometheus says, look, these are great little things, these fellows. And what we're going to do is I'm going to teach them to hunt. I'm going to teach them to build. I'm going to teach them to do this, that, and the other. We're going to teach them to speak. These are great lads. They're a hoot, right? And I'm going to teach them to cook, and I'm going to teach them to forge fire. and then Zeus says, no way.

22:18No way in the world are you going to give these creatures fire. And that's the moment where the Greeks were telling each other that fire is the key technology. He says, if you give them fire, you will do two things. One is you will give them the ability to fashion weapons, bronze, et cetera, and they may well have a go at us. So if you give them fire, they will develop the technologies to replace the gods. That's number one. But number two, if you give them fire in their bellies, that idea of animation, divine fire, creativity,

22:55David McWilliams: inspiration, ambition, drive, all these things that we talk about having, someone having fire in their belly, what you will do is you will create a parallel power structure to us. So what is fascinating for me is that the Greeks appreciated these things, that this is what made humans extraordinary. So anyway, Zeus said, all right, Prometheus, you can hang out with these people, but no fire. And then Prometheus is hanging out with these people and he likes them and they like him and they're little creatures and they create this thing called the Golden Age and the humans are all living in the Golden Age and there's no disease, there's no poverty, there's no hunger.

23:34David McWilliams: This is basically the Garden of Eden in Christian thinking. Right, yeah. Garden of Eden, so it's perfect. Adam and Zeus are hanging out. It's the same basic story. and in the golden age, everything's great. They're fine. But Prometheus says, there's something missing here. There's something missing. These humans need something else. They really need fire. And for some bizarre reason, Prometheus, John, decides to go to Mount Olympus to the gods and grab a burning branch and bring it down to the humans below and teach them how to use fire. Okay. And very, very soon, Zeus, who at this stage is sitting around scratching his nads, because all he was doing was drinking and, you know.

24:17Carousing. Drinking and carousing, yeah. Drinking and carousing, like a proper emperor, right? He sees all these little fires down with the little humans and realizes they have fire, and he goes apeshit. He goes absolutely mad. And what he does is he punishes Prometheus by banishing him to a rock, John. A rock in what is now Georgia. And every single day, a buzzard would eat his liver. But his liver would grow again, and the buzzard would pluck the liver out. So that was his punishment. But the punishment to humans was what we know to be Pandora's box. So Pandora is the first woman, the first human woman.

24:59And Zeus says to Pandora, you can have anything you want. You're beautiful. You can sing beautiful music. you can have children, you can really, really have an amazing life. But don't open that box. But of course, Pandora, being a human, is curious.

25:19David McWilliams: Because curiosity killed the cat. Because that's what makes us human. It's like when you go out on a Friday night and people are saying, don't open that door into that dodgy bar. And you barge open into the bar. But now I have to open that door. You have to open the door because that's what makes us human. And of course, then what you see is in the box is disease, poverty, war, torture, pain, all those things. So when she opens the box, all these spirits come out and they destroy the golden age. So remember the golden age was when humans didn't have fire. They didn't have curiosity. We were kind of a little bit sort of robotic, but we had peace and prosperity and no hunger.

26:02once you open Pandora's box, you have disease, hunger, hurt, pain, all the things that make life complex, but make life difficult. And of course, the fascinating thing for me is that the lesson from Zeus, and while I was listening to reviews of the Odyssey and Greek mythology, was that in fashioning and taming fire, the Greeks realized that we had propelled ourselves into a different world away from the animals. And that was both good, i.e. our ability to use fire, but bad in terms of all the various nefarious things that human civilization brought with it. Because human civilization without fire isn't civilization.

26:52And when you look at AI, John, now, It has that slightly Promethean feeling to it because the celebrants of AI will say that this is a Promethean energy that is going to positively change the human experience for good. But the skeptics of AI are thinking, hold on a second. Do we know what we're really involving ourselves in? Are we actually doing something that could change the essence of what it is to be human? and fascinatingly thousands of years after the Greeks wrote this stuff down we are still dealing with the same moral ambiguity moral dilemmas moral fears moral hopes yeah yeah and again it's something that I find fascinating John is that those questions that you're asking now about AI

27:45David McWilliams: were exactly what the Greeks were asking 3000 years ago yeah but I mean even like throughout human history as we've spoken about on the podcast many times, there's been big leaps and bounds in technology. You know, the fire was a very simple one. But also, you know, fast forward and then you have, you know, the printing press was another big one. The Industrial Revolution, blah, blah, blah. You know, the Internet was the big idea of the time. All of that. But deep down in me, I feel like there's something very different, fundamentally different about AI because it is moving at such a pace and on a global scale, like pretty much every sector is affected.

28:28And it's like the cost of adaptation, like we spoke about in climate change earlier, with the loss of jobs and human purpose. And I think that there is a lack of understanding and a lot of misunderstanding as to its real purpose. So the big question for you then is that what do you think the main and immediate impact of AI, say over the next five years, over the next hundred years, it won't matter that much because we'll have been through it. Brown bread. Yeah, probably. But before you answer that, let's have a little bit of this.

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30:44so mac where is ai taking us short term medium term look i think what we should look at is the very short term and look at it from the very narrow gauge economic lens because if we talk about consciousness and what it is to be human and all those things it can lead us into a very different discussion which we could have in a more philosophical one but we might have we need

31:08David McWilliams: more points for that. We're far too sober. Exactly. We're far too sober. So let's have a look. So the first thing that is interesting is AI is a general purpose technology. So most technology is a specific purpose technology. It's basically, you know, I'm talking to you through a mic. That mic is designed by a German. It's a German mic, isn't it? No, it's a Shure. I think it's an American company, actually. You're okay. So it's a specific purpose technology to make these podcasts work and to make recording work. But AR is a general purpose technology, right? So because it is replicating human consciousness, human ability, human minds, it's basically, as we know, large language models are basically taking everything that's ever been written, ever, and is synthesizing it down into the fastest almost Google search you could ever imagine.

32:01And that's the basic chat GPT early model But what is happening is increasingly that model is getting more and more intelligent because it's absorbing more and more information. And then as processing becomes quicker and quicker, it's able to not just digest that information, but it's able to throw it out of information. So the first thing is, will it be enhancing human productivity or will it be replacing us? So will the robots make us cleverer, smarter, more productive, saving us time and allowing us to do different things or will it just replace us completely? That's the first thing. I get the feeling that the people who are agitating for general AI are quite happy to make us redundant.

32:54Ultimately, the capital that has been deployed in AI is being deployed by a very small amount of people. who own it. These kind of techno feudal overlords, right? And I think it's becoming now increasingly apparent to a lot of people that hold on a second, if this general purpose AI replaces an enormous amount of humanity on what they call, and I know you hate this, but all those technos, they call it drudge jobs, right? Those drudge jobs are done by people. And also if you think that a huge amount of technology, particularly business to consumer technology, business to business technology, is about eliminating the middleman.

33:37The problem is that the middleman is us. The middleman is the broad service worker who goes in and does a job. So first things first is, if you believe that AI is going to be in the business of replacing a huge amount of jobs, and if you believe that this is like nothing we've ever seen before, in the sense that it'll be quicker, more aggressive, etc., then you have to take the view that a large, large surplus of labor, of people, are going to be made redundant. And they may not necessarily have the skills or the willingness to be able to work doing anything other than just simply being on the slack heap.

34:30And that is a big worry. And then, of course, if you take that lumpen proletariat, as Marx used to call them, right, then you think, okay, well, then there's going to be people in the service industry, like waiters, bartenders, you know, people who work in the experience economy, people who work in tourism, all these things, that can't be replaced by robots. But they're going to work in pretty labor-intensive and consequently low-wage jobs. So you have a significant amount of people who are made redundant by automation. Then you have another part of people who are not going to be made redundant, but who are working in the service sector.

35:09Yeah. Then the third element would be still the sort of elite, right?

35:14David McWilliams: People who are in the top 15 % or top 10 % who'll be able to combine AI, be able to work with it, still be able to create products, will still be able to use their own emotional intelligence as well as the AI's sort of technological intelligence. And then at the very, very top, you will have, this is a sort of dystopian worldview, but why not have a dystopian worldview in the middle of summer, John? And at the very, very top, you will have, is it a handful? Is it 100? Is it 10 ,000? Sort of techno overlords who own the machines, who own the capital. because if we're going into a world of capital intensity, it means the returns to capital will increase.

35:57And if the returns to capital are being funneled into a smaller and smaller and smaller group who have a massive outsized impact on policy

36:05David McWilliams: because they're so rich and they're so powerful, you can see how this could totally upend the social status quo, the contract between government and the governed, between taxpayers and the state, between workers and non-workers, between consumers and producers. I mean, you can really see it. Yeah, but this is the whole thing. I mean, whatever about AI, I mean, this was always my view of capitalism, that capitalism and making money and doing your best and innovation and all that stuff, it's all wonderful. That's all great. But if, as you just said, if you have an ever-increasing concentration of wealth in the very, very few, well, then you have everybody else going, hang on a second, this isn't fair.

36:54They're not going to sit on their arse and accept that. There will be turmoil. There will be revolution, as there always has been throughout history. Yeah, I think it's a fellow called Brandeis who was the attorney general in the United States, head of the Supreme Court. I think he might've been in the 40s. He said, you can have inequality and democracy, but you can't have both for very long, right? And what he was basically saying is that this level of inequality, which has been accelerated and amplified by the adoption of this general purpose technology, which isn't open source, which has been owned in the United States in particular by a small amount of people, that this will absolutely undermine the social fabric of early 21st century democracies.

37:43So are you saying that they, as in the musks and the teals and all those guys, are they missing this point or do they not care? I'm not too sure. I'm not too sure. But what I would say, and we leave it here, John, is that wisdom is different to technological intelligence. and wisdom is a deep source, a deep font of human experience largely parsed by emotional intelligence, not necessarily IQ and certainly not the size of one's wallet. And I think that's why we started with the fires, we go back to the Greeks because the wisdom that the Greeks had pertains. So John, I'm going to end the podcast with the wisdom of the big Lebowski.

38:38Final word, the dude abides. And what it means is you go through life, you get on with yourself, you're still here, you take the world as it comes, you roll with the punches, and that is more wisdom than we usually get at the end of a podcast. So that's it for lovers of the big Lebowski. I don't know how we went from Prometheus to Zeus to the big Lebowski, back to John's feet in a bucket of ice. We will talk to you on Tuesday.

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