Revenge of the Nerds

0:00David McWilliams: Coming up on the podcast, the end of the software revolution. Are software engineers about to become the horses of the new industrial economy? Sounds pyrrhic, sounds cryptic, all will be explained in a couple of minutes. Over 90 of the top 100 U.S. accounting firms trust Bill to simplify and secure BillPay. That's proven financial infrastructure built on over a trillion dollars of secure payments. Visit bill.com slash proven for a special offer. A password manager should be the first security purchase you make for your team. Why? Because compromised passwords are the number one way bad actors attack companies, and small businesses are their favorite targets.

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1:10David McWilliams: Just a quick heads up before we start. This week's lecture is going to be on the twilight of the feudal economy. It is the role of money in transforming Europe in the dark ages. Fascinating. Absolutely brilliant stuff. If you remember The Crew, you get it all for free. But if you want to join us and learn economics together, sign up now. davidmcwilliams.ie forward slash crew. Talk to you soon and happy to have you as part of The Crew. To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. Nerd! Nerds. Nerds. Nerds! What is a nerd?

2:00I'm not kissing a nerd. I know what we're going to do. John, do you know what that soundtrack was from? What? That movie, Nerds. It was Revenge of the Nerds, John,

2:15David McWilliams: which was a 1984 blockbuster. Was it a blockbuster? I remember the name. I actually don't remember the movie at all. Well, this is going to be The Last of the Nerds is the name of this podcast. Right. Okay. Because Revenge of the Nerds was, and I remember you always say that culture is sometimes ahead of economics, right? So this was a blockbuster from summer of 1984. But what it was presaging was the era of the nerd was emerging, right? So it was basically an American, in effect, comedy. Although they're not, you know the American comedies aren't that funny? Well, I mean, that's a huge generalization.

2:53But they have a lot of canned laughter, right? I mean, so this podcast is all going to be about

3:00David McWilliams: what is going to happen to the nerd now that AI is taking over software programming. And this is hugely important to many millions of people. There's so many graduates who are software engineers who are employed now. So many software engineer graduates are seeing their income collapse. Most importantly, this podcast has been triggered by the collapse in the share price of software companies, which for the last 40 years were almost like a safe bet. You know, people said, you know, go into engineering, go into software, go into tech. That's where all the money is. It's like back in our day, it was like going to insurance or banking, you know, the nice, safe, pensionable job.

3:42Exactly, exactly. So you won't be walking around unemployed, right? But so if you think about what is happening now is AI is eating the lunch of software engineers at a rate much, much more aggressively than it is other skills.

4:00David McWilliams: So it also, what I want to take the podcast is also what skills will be rewarded in the future? because for the last 40 years, a huge amount of human talent went into software engineering because there was good jobs, there was good income, there was good status. And now what we're seeing in essentially a span of a few days, we're seeing a massive change in the perception of what a career is going to be. Yeah. And the Revenge of the Nerds is interesting because this marks the point, 1984. so you're talking the beginning of Microsoft, the beginning of the data-driven economy, we've been in an era of tech, right?

4:43Big tech, small tech, data-driven, all that sort of idea.

4:48David McWilliams: And behind this was the software engineer. And the software engineer was the sort of hero of tech. And because they were tend to be typically nerdy, so basically the Revenge of the Nerds is all about how a face-off between jocks and nerds in an American high school, right? okay and there's a whole load of those kind of movies yeah exactly and the 80s the dweeby nerdy guy gets gets the chick at the end of it that's the story never happened to us but there you go no chicks no nerds no nothing with the middle of the road gobshires get nothing exactly but so that's what the podcast is going to be about today john excellent excellent well speaking of 1984 i I have to say, do you remember back in the 70s and early 80s, there was loads of power cuts?

5:36Yes. Well, the other night, we were sitting around the table, the family were sitting around the table and having a lovely little meal, drinking a little glass of vino, and boom, the lights went out. And we were in the dark for, I don't know, three or four hours. And we were scrambling around. Is that in the ghetto of Stilorgan? In the ghetto of Stilorgan. And whipping out candles and stuff. So we ended up kind of sitting there with nothing to do. It was too early for bed. So we ended up sitting there listening to, have you ever heard this podcast, Petrified? No, but it sounds petrifying. I'm already scared.

6:11It's written and produced by a friend of mine, Liam Geraghty. But they're kind of ghost stories. But one of the ones, and the reason I'm bringing it up, is one of the episodes I listened to the other night was Ghost Estates. And it was a whole ghost story set in a ghost state down, I don't know, Leitrim or somewhere like that. and it was about this couple living alone in the ghost estate. Or were they? Brilliant. Check it out. Petrified. Okay, great. But you came up with that phrase, ghost estate. It's very true. It's very true. I mean, it was one of those ones I didn't think would stick.

6:44David McWilliams: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's interesting you say about Leitrop because it was after, I don't really know Sligo very well. Yeah. And I had to do an event up there in, I remember distinctly it was November of 2006. and I drove up there, did the gig, and then I drove back and you know I'm not a very good driver, so I'm sort of contemplating the world, sort of pulling in and, you know, whatever. Lines on the road are just kind of suggestions. Yeah, they're nudges, exactly. But what really fascinated me was everywhere on the road from Sligo to around Longford, that stretch of the road, which is a very, very bad road, I remember.

7:26But every little village had these massive estates built and there was nobody in them. And I had this image of the Mary Celeste. Do you remember the Mary Celeste? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That they found this ghost ship and it looked as if it had been inhabited but there was no evidence of humanity. That's where the whole thing came from. And I just thought, these are the Mary Celeste of housing estates because who's going to live them? Like you'd have a small little town somewhere outside Sligo. maybe a town land with a population of 100 and suddenly even a state for 300 people. And I hadn't realised that these estates were being built everywhere.

8:07And it's funny that, you know, the ghost estate, it just actually captured people's imaginations. Yeah. Because people could see that these were estates that were being built by a tax break. Yeah. And that was the only reason. And it was the only... There was no plan or anything. There was no plan. There was no people. There was no industry. there was no reason for them at all to exist.

8:27David McWilliams: So just imagine the Mary Celeste, John, of housing estates. And there you were in the impoverished ghetto of Stilorgan. Yeah. The other night. The candles. Okay, so shout out for Petrified, a podcast there. All right, let's go back to the subject at hand, which is the end of the nerd. So we are coming to an end, I think, of an era of industrialization. And the reason I call it industrialization is that if you think of the industrial revolution, industrial revolution probably went on for about 100 years because the pace of technological change was slow. It was fast at the time. Really fast at the time.

9:08Yeah. And completely changed the world.

9:10David McWilliams: But now because the pace of technological change is so quick, jobs, careers, companies, industries, entire regions that were based on software engineering and tech. are being threatened by the very clinical of software engineering, in effect, which is AI, which is a product of the software engineer's brain. It's cannibalism. The lead singer of a rock band didn't come up with AI, right? A poet didn't come up with AI, you know? A fellow working in a shop didn't come up with AI. A software engineer... Although it was dreamed about back in the 1920s. You know, Metropolis was all about robots and AI.

9:52Fritz Lang, look at that bit of Fritz Lang. There you go. German, higher art, the whole thing. Anyway, let us get back to the job at hand, right?

9:59David McWilliams: The reason I say the Industrial Revolution is because what is happening with AI is going to be as profound as the Industrial Revolution. So the Industrial Revolution began in the middle of the 18th century. Yes. And took off. So what were the main changes in the Industrial Revolution to both society and culturally? So in parenthesis, this podcast is going to be software engineer as horse. So the Industrial Revolution, in our minds, when we think of the Industrial Revolution, we think of the steam engine as having changed power generation. Yeah. So for tens of thousands of years, the only energy that we had was animals and humans pulling things with muscle power.

10:47Yeah, raw muscles. Raw muscles.

10:49David McWilliams: And in effect, humans and animals. And of course, the animal that was most used was the poor old horse, right? So the horse became the labourer of humanity. And as a result of this, the horse was the most endangered species when the steam engine came along. So James Watt, Scottish engineer, is a bit like all engineers. the way engineers really kind of get off on design and the power and the propulsion and the mechanics. I love engineers. You loved it, right, yeah. The mechanics of it and how it all works and all this sort of stuff. But, of course, the problem with the steam engine, you had to sell it to somebody, right?

11:27There was no point having the steam engine. And, of course, the most likely buyers of the steam engine

11:34David McWilliams: were industries that were energy intensive because if they could buy something that was replacing the horse, they could actually save money. Yeah. So what came down to try and sell the steam engine in Manchester? And why was that? Because he was trying to sell the steam engine to the owners of mines. Right. Right? Up in the north of England. Right? Fellas who talk like Andy Farrell. Okay? Or that lad. And he brought this down. So the Scottish geyser brings down. And of course the mine, he was talking about the amazing technology and the mine owners only wanted to know how many horses is saved.

12:13David McWilliams: So the problem with mining is water. There's water under the surface. Yeah, yeah, of course. The water seeps down through the rock. Seeps down through the rock. So to actually, to mine coal, you have to first take out water. And to take out water... The water table. Exactly. And to take out water, they needed energy. And the energy that was used in the coal mines before 1760, when Watt came along, were horses. And the poor old horses would basically be going around in a circle at the top of the mines, pulling, in effect, water out of. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's the pump. They were the engine of the pump.

12:50They were the engine of the pump, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

12:52David McWilliams: So when what came down and it was going on about the technology and the brilliant this, that, and the other, the man, lads, well, how many fucking horses does it save? So basically that's where the expression horsepower comes from. Yeah. So the horsepower that we now use all the time, actually was the beginning of the end of the Pural horse, right? So the horse was kind of happy about that. Well, the horse was probably happy. I hadn't talked to the horse at the time. Anyway, my point is that the software engineer is the horse of the 21st century. Right, go on, explain that one. AI is the steam engine.

13:29Yeah.

13:30David McWilliams: And AI is destroying the horse. Now, what is going to happen, I think, with AI is that all this, and we're going to talk about software, but just put this image in your head, right? All this investment in AI is huge, huge, hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. And all the AI proponents and evangelists are saying, it's going to change our lives. It's going to be wonderful. At some stage, the rubber is going to hit the road. And somebody says, how do you make money out of this? And the way in which they will make money is it will be AI will be valued in the same way as the steam engine was valued at how many horses it eliminates because horses were expensive and to feed them you had to keep them all that sort of stuff yeah yeah yeah ai is now going to be valued on how many people it eliminates but you have to feed them as well you have to feed them you have to dress them you have to be nice to tickle them sometimes they talk to you like horses with bloody ads right but this is what i think is going to happen is that horsepower is a code for the elimination of a certain source of energy i think ai is going to be judged by how many humans it eliminates and those weirdos in silicon valley will come up with a term for this because the only way it can actually make financial sense is if it's a cost saver like the steam engine but but is the shift then going to be away from like i understand the whole idea of coders you know sitting in front of a computer tapping away code writing a different language as it were yeah but at the end of the day are those guys not going to shift over to programming ai and working on developing ai as opposed to the software side of things well at the moment the financial markets are saying no right so we're seen crashes in all software related stocks.

15:32David McWilliams: So if you think of what a software company is in effect, it's a large stable of software engineers, of human programmers. And those human programmers are skilled. They also have networks. They have know-how. They have experience. And they're expensive. They're expensive. So if you go and you say, okay, I want my revenue streams to be more efficient. Well, a programmer will write you, based on the data you give them, will write you a program code and lo and behold, you're given a more efficient way of doing this, right? Of working. If AI can do that, that eliminates all those programmers. Hundreds of them, thousands of them.

16:16But there needs to be oversight, though, at the same time. Yeah, but you can have some oversight. It's like you and the horses. So what I'm saying is

16:25David McWilliams: we're looking at a potential era change because for people who didn't understand software and writing code there was a perception that this was incredibly technically difficult to do but if you talk to coders themselves they will say a lot of it's really drudge work that it's actually very very basic drudge work yeah dressed up as creativity and now AI has shone a light on that. So basically new AI programs, which are, you know, as you know, being updated every hour at this stage, right? Yeah. Is driving a coach in horses through the notion that coding is technically very, very sophisticated. Yeah.

17:08The reason it's driving

17:10David McWilliams: a coach in horses through it, it's called now vibe coding. Vibe coding. Vibe coding. Oh my God. Right? That's a terrible name. I know, it's brutal, isn't it? But the idea, the idea is you can now talk to the machine. Yeah. And remember you start using different language. Yes. In a way, AI has brought English back into coding. Yeah. Because one of the whole mystique of coding was computer language. Yes. Right? Yeah. You see reams and reams of symbols. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So things that look like hieroglyphics, right? Yeah. And so therefore it appeared really weird because it was a different language.

17:47Now what the AI is, you just speak into the machine. It's just amazing when you think of it. And therefore, what's going to do is people with almost no skills are going to be able to instruct the machine to do what hundreds and thousands of software engineers were doing

18:06David McWilliams: for the last 40 years. But you know what? That's where creativity comes back in, because it's like using any of the AIs, ChatGPT or any of those. you only get out what you put in you know the quality of of your prompt will give you the the answer that you're looking for if you put in crap prompts you know it's it's kind of useless in many ways but it does remind when you're talking there reminds me of if you remember back when computers were first introduced to schools in the early 80s and I remember going down to the library in CBC and we were shown there's a computer. I thought they introduced reading to CBC in the 1980s.

18:51Yeah that too yeah and I knew leather straps but you know and I remember getting all excited go computer what does this do and there was fellas using C plus language or whatever the the most basic language was and I just couldn't get my head around it. Why do I want to do this and they create an image on a black and white image on a screen i'm going i don't see the value in this but it was only a few years later when you start seeing the software as you're talking about yeah where you can actually use a word processor you know like microsoft word and and then spreadsheets and that and that was useful but yeah but you didn't like you say you didn't have to know the language and the coding behind it you just used it for what it is so this is very similar this is kind of like the next phase of it absolutely and i actually think you know it's

19:49David McWilliams: interesting you say i was just thinking of you software engineer john became a sound engineer by the way yes i couldn't spell right it's like that like software said but but it's interesting you talk about, there was a thing in economics called Geigo. What's that? Which were economic models. Garbage in, garbage out. Yes. So that's like, you know, the same thing. Same idea, you know, that we basically have these big, huge, massive models of the economy. And if you fed shite into them, you'd get shite out. Yeah, exactly. So, but you're absolutely right. But think about the 80s. It's an epoch changing.

20:27So the arrival of those computers in CBC

20:30David McWilliams: amongst town, right, marked the beginning of a four or five decade era of the ascent of the nerd. Because suddenly those guys had the key to progress. They were at the vanguard of a technological revolution that most people experience in things like Excel, right? That's how they experience it. But in actual fact, what was going on behind was really creative and was really engineeringly sophisticated. But the problem now is that that can be done by this AI model. Now, of course, the AI models will get better and better and better because what they're doing, in effect, is they are running their own programs to eliminate mistakes.

21:17David McWilliams: And over time, they'll get better and better and better and better. So what does that mean? It means that the oversight will be one human. Yes. As opposed to 100 ,000 humans writing the code And of course, this will shift dramatically the status and centres of power in people's careers away from engineers towards administrators, towards managers. And those managers will speak to the machines. So it takes away a huge amount of mystique. And what you're seeing now is stock markets are realising, shit, Microsoft, full of software engineers. Yeah, yeah. Where's the value? So there'll be a massive destruction of value.

22:03I mean, it might happen quickly, it might happen slowly, but it's definitely going to be an industrial revolution style change. But I wonder what will happen then if a lot of the software engineers find themselves kind of without a job or, you know, wages collapse or whatever it is, that, you know, how they turn around and then use AI for the next phase. Yeah. So they're not kind of on the dung heap. No, no, but I mean, if there is... They're going to drive it. If there is a massive destruction of value,

22:42David McWilliams: that will have a profound impact on the way whole regions of the world are managed, the way whole careers are managed. If you think about the Industrial Revolution, what the Industrial Revolution did, think about England, what it did to England. England was a rural country, an incredibly rural country, up until about 1750. And it became an urban country incredibly quickly. It became depopulated rurally. You have these massive cities, your Liverpools, your Manchester, your Sheffields, your Leeds, this extraordinary transformation in the way people lived. For example, waged workers were totally unheard of before the Industrial Revolution.

23:30The idea that you'd work for a wage and your wage would be determined by the productivity of the machine that you are being governed by. You know, think about this. These are huge changes. Total change perception in time

23:45David McWilliams: because suddenly then time becomes money. and wages were reflective of how much work per hour. This is all really new. Agricultural societies never talked about per hour. They had seasons and they had a day's labour, and a day's labour was determined not by the hour, but it was determined by the crop. Yes, you were dictated by the crop. The crop, right? So if you imagine what the Industrial Revolution did, it completely changed what it was to be human. The human experience changed. and this is what we're talking about. Can I ask you a question? This is a slight aside. That's not surprising, John.

24:24When you're talking about, you know, investors and the markets looking at these software companies and going, well, I don't see the value in that. It's, you know, we have AI now to do all the programming, as it were, and the coding. But what about the markets themselves? When AI starts... Very good question. When AI starts taking over markets and it's AI that's trading and you take the human analysis and gut feel and FOMO out of markets. What happens then?

24:56David McWilliams: That's a really good question because I told you when I worked in markets in London, they were absolutely distinctly human places. Yeah. So I worked in a big trading floor full of Cockneys, right? And I loved Cockneys. And it was alive and it was noisy and it was human and it was emotional, as you say, the FOMO. and it was gossip and it was rumour and it was greed and it was fear and it was really good fun. So the thing about a trading floor is you'd open the door to a trading floor and the first thing that would hit you is the noise. Fellas shouting down the phones, right? I'd love to have seen that actually.

25:33I've never experienced it. It was such fun. I mean, and I loved it. I just loved the energy of it, the dynamism and the characters. You know, because the city, because it was a money-making machine, It attracted in all sorts of weirdos and speculators and hustlers, as you say, right?

25:48David McWilliams: But the noise of the trading floor was both intimidating and exhilarating. Apparently now, trading floors are all quiet. Really? It's all done by high-frequency trading, by machines. Right. So Michael Lewis is… But there are fellas at the end of phones. No, no, very few. Very, very few. So you program the machine to look for the anomalies in the prices. It's not fellas anymore selling the stocks. It is machines selling each other. So it's called high-frequency trading. So the basic idea now is that where you make money in trading is a certain anomaly. You have a little bit of information that I don't have, and then you exploit that information to sell me something too expensively, typically, right?

26:33David McWilliams: So that's what it's all about. That's why the networks were so important. And that's why you talk to a guy and they'd say, he's got a good trading sense, right? Yeah. He knew when there was this tiny anomaly in the price and he'd sell or buy on the back of that. But then all these anomalies are going to become a knowledge. That's exactly happening. Within a computer kind of environment. And that's why high-frequency trading, it's all about executing trades in milliseconds. So identifying the anomaly in the price before the next machine. This is freaking bonkers. This is what's happening. Michael Lewis has written a whole book about high-frequency trading.

27:10David McWilliams: Now, of course, there are, therefore, trading houses that employ software geniuses to write the algorithms for the high-frequency trading programs. But there's no crack in that. No, but not just there's no crack in that, but that's the bit that's going to change because there won't be the fellas writing the code to identify the anomalies because AI will be running that. Yes, so that's what I'm saying. This is where I come back. It's an industrial revolution style change. So humans aren't going to be trading. It's going to be computers trading. It's going to be computers. Claude trading with Chachi PT and blah, blah, blah.

27:50Whatever the version of that, yeah. So it takes out the human side of commerce.

27:57David McWilliams: Now, the interesting thing of commerce is commerce is about engagement. Yeah. I mean, there was a really interesting expression by a French sociologist called Marcel Mauss. Now, we've gone from Fritz Lang to Marcel Mauss. And Marcel Mauss, M-A-U-S, right, who wrote a whole thesis, a very obscure reference, on gifting, John. Right. And why humans gave gifts. It's an anthropological idea, right? Right, okay, okay. Because gifting would have been the first way in which we traded. And it was status and hierarchy. But he said something interesting. He said, in order to trade, man must first throw down the spear.

28:36David McWilliams: And I always thought that was a really interesting idea. So once we start trading to each other, we start to get to know each other. We throw down the spear. We become friends. We become extended families. We become a network. And there's negotiation and blah, blah, blah. So the essential alchemy of commerce is human emotions. And to be able to read people, to be able to understand what people want. So one of the greatest things about trading, John, I know we're going off on a bit of a tangent here. This is a good tangent. But what I love about trading is for a trade to work, everybody has to think the other guy's a gobshite.

29:09David McWilliams: Yeah. If you think about it, right? So if you sell me something for 100 euros, what you actually think is I'm in Egypt for buying it for 100 euros. Yeah. And what I actually think deep down is you're in Egypt for selling it for 100 euros. Yeah, yeah. So you think you've got a bargain as the buyer. And I think I've shafted you as the seller. So imagine that this is a beautiful human concoction that for trading to work beautifully, we have to actually think we've outfoxed each other. So it's essentially human nature. Of course, there's value. Like a bicycle is worth X amount, right? But when it comes to that, so when you think about the Silk Roads, for example, But when you think about any sort of trading route, what you're actually talking about is human connection.

29:59Yeah, yes. Of course. You know? So then to follow that through, then if AI starts becoming more prominent in trading in the markets and shares. Trading in everything, trading in everything. So then what does a human do? Pick up the spear again? Well, this, oh, I like what you did there. I like what you did there. John is predicting a violent 21st century. on the back. Yes, I am. But anything is possible. The other issue that I can imagine happening is, and I think it has happened before, when there is automated trading and AI takes over trading, is that in all technology, there are glitches. But particularly in AI that relies so much on data centres and data centres rely so much on energy.

30:48And, you know, I started talking about a blackout. The power cut. Yeah, so what happens if there is a...

30:54David McWilliams: Well, listen, that's the weakness in an excessively data-driven world where you are beholden to hackers, number one. Yeah. Okay, and that's obvious. Yeah. Algorithmic trading tends to amplify upswings and downturns. This is where it takes out the human agency, the human sense of is this right? Is it wrong? And as you know, you become absolutely energy dependent. Yeah. Which is, of course, why data centers are about 11 or 12 % of the total cost of data centers is just the energy. And this is why data centers all over the states now, for example, are driving up energy prices in certain data centered counties that have gone down that route.

31:42David McWilliams: And of course, people are saying, well, hold on a second. My energy bill is going up because of a data center. It's not to do with my consumption of electricity. So there's all sorts of things going on and humans come back in. But I mean, what I think is the most interesting thing is that we are looking at an end of an era. Yeah. That I find fascinating. Well, let's talk about the human aspect of that after a bit of this.

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33:47So, Mac, we're talking about the end of an era, end of the Industrial Revolution, who'd started, you know... A different Industrial Revolution. Yes. So, basically, the idea, John, would be like the Industrial Revolution, then you'd like to get the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution. As you were saying,

34:03David McWilliams: when you went to the computer room in CBC Monkstown, right, in 1984, that was the beginning of something. Yes. And the revenge of the nerds We started with the culturally, we could see there was something happening in American schools, right? We've had 40 years of that. And now it seems to be coming to a very quick end. So what is, and we were just talking about AI and the impact of AI on markets and trading and the whole shebang. But what about the human side? Well, this is fascinating. So what you're seeing when you're talking to, particularly when you're talking to younger people who are going for jobs now, what they are being told is that skills are a given right yeah your technical ability is a commodity and it's been commoditized yeah because there's stuff you learn so this is stuff you learn but everyone is being regarded as having the ability to learn the technical skills and of course AI is allowing people to do things that they could never do before so for example Take the Industrial Revolution, the loom, the spinning jenny.

35:11David McWilliams: Do you remember those things, John, right? Yeah, I do, I do. Okay, so in the past, there would have been a master weaver. And that master weaver would have been a very, really highly skilled artisan making stuff. And when you basically automate that, as they did with the spinning jenny and all these sort of things, what you have is a steam-driven product eliminates the master weaver. and suddenly people with much less skill can do the job that the weaver had to spend years of being an apprentice etc same thing is happening in many technical areas so what younger people now are as loads I'm sure listening to the podcast loads and loads of software engineers who went into software engineering in 2000 just after the pandemic yeah went to college their four years promised you know you're going to get a job in one of the big software companies now there are thousands of those kids who can't get jobs because software companies are no longer employing as i said banks of software engineers because they're thinking hold on ai is going to be able to do that so that is a massive shift where does the future lie then well the one good thing is that what always happens is that you know the way for example the luddites do you hear about the luddites the luddites was it was a revolution in england against the the loom against the steam loom.

36:34David McWilliams: But they're really protecting their own patch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what tends to happen is the economy recalibrates and new jobs emerge. So for example, even the expression software engineer, if you were living in the 1970s, you had no idea what a software engineer was because they didn't exist. So this is to your point that actually people recalibrate and do other things and they use their skills. But the moment that we're at now is one of transformation from one type of economy to another type of economy. And I think that is worthy of discussion and worthy of thought and a little bit of anxiety about it.

37:10David McWilliams: Not least because, I'll give you an example. There's an AI safety leader. Now, that's a very new job. I bet you know when we were knocking around in school. With a clipboard and a... And a social conscience. That's the worst type of nerd. A hard hat and a high-vis jacket. There's a geezer called Mernak Swarma. Yeah. Does sound like a babass. This guy was Anthropic's AI safety leader. Right. And he has just quit because of his fears of what AI is doing to humanity. Jesus, that's not good. And do you know what he's starting to do? He wants to be a poet. Good man. So there you have it. It's the revenge of Yeats.

37:52David McWilliams: The nerd is gone. The poets are back in. But this, again, is an idea that poetry is spiritual. Yeah. Poetry affects you in a very deep emotional place. Yeah. Because it writes about deep emotional stuff and it communicates very, very soft. It's a thing called feelings, John. Remember we used to have them? Yeah. Right? And maybe what we're looking at is the return of poetry. I did a TED Talk on why we should have less economists, more poets ahead of my time. Yes. And in effect, I think that's what's happened. That you're going to see the re-emergence of the soft skills. Yeah. Human skills, empathy, these type of ideas.

38:36And I welcome this change. So it's a bright new world, man. It's a bright new world of poets who hit you in the heart, comedians who can make you laugh.

38:47David McWilliams: These sort of people are actually the future. They're unique, yeah. And we will end with a quote from Jerry Seinfeld, who talked about AI. And this was his quote. He said, we are smart enough to invent AI, dumb enough to need it, and so stupid that we don't even know if we did the right thing. End of story.

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