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Token math, YOLO business strategies, and the true cost of your attention
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When companies mandate AI adoption without a use case, without a strategy, and without a business outcome in mind, they don't get transformation. They get jazz hands and nightmare token bills.
This month's System Update pulls apart what's actually happening beneath the headlines: Oracle's 21,000 layoffs attributed to "AI adoption," Amazon arming junior developers to replace senior engineers, and enterprises burning through AI budgets they cannot predict or control.
The deeper argument George K. and George A. make is harder to dismiss than the headlines. You cannot drive deterministic business outcomes with probabilistic means of production. The CEOs and CTOs who greenlit LLM adoption at scale are now facing a math problem that no earnings call language can paper over.
The free water is now a metered utility. Will the bill ever be worth paying?
The episode also turns to labor theater and what we’re giving our attention to: what we lose when institutions optimize for engagement over depth, and what it costs when an entire generation learns to consume rather than think.
Mentioned:
- NYT on Schneider Electric’s AI adoption without layoffs
- Amazon tokenmaxxing mandate goes sideways
- Oracle sheds 13% of its workforce amid so-called AI adoption
- Amazon still hiring junior employees while also doing layoffs…?
- The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, by Jonathan Rose
- Snap’s intentional targeting of teens' attention
- Denmark invests in de-screening its schools
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Transcript
Introduction to Hosts and Podcast
00:00:08
Speaker
Yo, this is Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks, the tech podcast about humans. I'm George K. And I'm George j And this week, as is our custom at the end of the month, is a system update.
00:00:21
Speaker
What is going on in the world of tech? What are the trends we are watching? What are things that we've discussed on the show? And yeah, we're going to get started. um Sometimes we call this episode letter rip. And so that should give you an idea of where we're going here. So that's right. That's right. We live it. We're in the trenches.
00:00:42
Speaker
We're sometimes annoyed by it. And this is a place to let off steam.
Collapse of Token Economy and Pricing Changes
00:00:47
Speaker
All right. We will start with the, probably the biggest story in a long time, which is the collapse of the token economy. So if if you haven't been paying attention,
00:01:01
Speaker
um the water is no longer free, right? So it's not now a metered utility. So all of the LLMs that have been in use, the CLAWS, the OpenAIs, whatever, they figured out that because it was starting to cost them more to run queries than they were getting out of the revenue.
00:01:22
Speaker
The math wasn't mathing. And so now instead of just sort of base pricing monthly subscriptions and more or less unlimited use within those bounds, they have to charge based on tokens, which is kind of an arbitrary unit of context that gets ingested into the model that has predictably made some people upset and it has also predictably led to skyrocketing costs on the usage side. That is down to ah us, the users upon whom this technology has been foisted every which way since Sunday.
00:01:59
Speaker
ah George, what do you think? but Yeah, don't know. I think like,
00:02:09
Speaker
i so I think the issue is this, right? It's, It's the issue of the fact that this is not about corporate balance sheets, right? This is not about positioning for cap tables. This is not about... It's not even about goddamn shareholder value, man. like I'll be real. I mean, it is, but it's not.
00:02:26
Speaker
Yes. This is really about... but It's like 9.30. I'm like barely a coffee in and I'm like, everything I wanted to say about these topics is just so Marxist and we're just being like rare about it. I don't even care.
00:02:39
Speaker
Like if people are listening to this, cool, welcome to the show, how you doing? I think the issue here is about the exploitation of labor, institutional coercion and honestly like, a systemic level of resource waste that we have not seen since probably with the eighties or nineties before people started really caring about the environment.
00:02:59
Speaker
Yes. And plus, plus let the layer on top of that, this like lemming, so most psychology, right? like stuff Oh my God, everyone else is using AI quickly. What is our AI strategy? Everyone use it. I don't want to get myself fired from any jobs or anything like that.
Corporate AI Strategy and Misalignment
00:03:16
Speaker
So I'll just, I'll try to generalize as much as possible, but it's like,
00:03:20
Speaker
um When you are dealing with people who are non-technical, own corporate assets, right? And they see this AI hype and they see this thing, right? And so in their mind, what they see is is market value. They're looking at shareholder reports because if they're public companies, they all invest in each other. So they all get each other's shareholder reports. And then they listen to each other's like quarterly, whatever the- noun cultures you Yeah, the quarterly calls or whatever. And they come back and they're like, hey, we got to re-adopt this. We got to do that.
00:03:52
Speaker
And like where I see a problem in a lot of like, like midsize, like mid market organizations and even like some of the smaller, like large enterprises, they see the big, big enterprises that are like, they have the resource base of a small country.
00:04:06
Speaker
And they can invest throwing hundreds or thousands of people at a problem and millions and billions of dollars. And they'll look you and the rest of the economy and be like, we need to do the same.
00:04:17
Speaker
And you're like, we have a fraction of a fraction of those resources and we're already strapped and we're already overworked. And then it's like, you to put this shit on top of it. and And so I think, you know, you start looking at like,
00:04:32
Speaker
almost like a decentralization of waste, right? So like you look at how, how the businesses are structured now in terms of pricing, like tech monopolies are kind of moving from, you know, flat rate subscriptions to everything is now usage-based. Everything now is a rental.
00:04:48
Speaker
right? So corporations are trying to offload cost and a cognitive burden onto their individual workers. Right. Which is also what Cory Doctorow affectionately coined as in shitification.
00:04:59
Speaker
Right. It's a classic yes technique, capture market, and then user your experience degrades over time. Oh yeah. And mean, there's a massive environmental and like computational tool on the whole thing, especially in in North America with the way we do it now. And I'm,
00:05:15
Speaker
um you know, as a technologist and a practitioner, I've always kind of made the theory that like small language models are are the sustainable feature, right? Where we're actually looking at individual use cases or solving for individual things.
00:05:28
Speaker
So I don't know, I see it as like a lot of squandering of resources And so from from ah from a security and kind of infrastructural perspective, we have to talk about like what a token really represents, right? And every token chewed up represents water used for data, um their best cooling a data center essentially, and the carbon emitted from the power
Inefficiency and Waste in AI Usage
00:05:51
Speaker
grid.
00:05:51
Speaker
Right. So I think there was ah a leak, a center audio that talked about like the biggest spike in token consumption isn't from engineers building groundbreaking tools, but it's from like non-technical staff just generating PowerPoint slides. and Yes. Yes. it's It's taking PDFs and lazily being like, turn this into a PowerPoint because it's it's law firms and consulting firms just relying heavily on on AI to just like produce reports that they used to mainly produce and they're paid a lot of money by their clients to manually produce and we're seeing time and time again, like, was it in Canada? But I think this also goes back to this larger vision failure, right? Yes.
00:06:33
Speaker
A few months back, and I'll try to find the source, you know, Accenture basically said, your career at this firm and your promotion path is contingent upon your use of AI.
00:06:46
Speaker
We similarly saw ah Amazon tell its engineering folks, token max right like the people who are using ai will succeed and then guess what happens people would just create agents to do nonsense so that they could rack up points on this token leaderboard and then when the cost came they were like oh right we have incentivized the wrong behavior right and so this the same firms that said go full bore again no clear strategy as to use case or why or business outcome
00:07:19
Speaker
And then the tooling changes the pricing and then suddenly they cannot account for the cost. I think you and I also discussed this a month ago when we talked about Uber burning through their entire Claude budget in four months.
00:07:38
Speaker
You I don't know how to square the circle. How do you drive deterministic business outcomes that create revenue and market value with probabilistic means of production?
00:07:52
Speaker
i look I have to just say, I look at this as... in the end, it's a massive waste of capital and compute, right? Like I see the next wave of of corporate surveillance where companies start tracking employee, quote, token efficiency the same way they used to track keystrokes. And some organizations still track keystrokes, and like a meta, right?
00:08:13
Speaker
We need to to focus on We need to focus on building tech that actually liberates workers from tedious tasks and not trap them in a circle of metered corporate compliance. And at the same time, we have to stop making the meta mistakes. Like meta, meta is ah is an amazing case study in how to actually lose corporate free will when the people actually back you. Because I remember when they came out with the Lama AI model and they made it free. and It was all open source and everyone loved them.
00:08:40
Speaker
Then suddenly like, you know, MetaWorld absolutely tanked because that that was a stupid idea that felt like I was playing an N64 game to be honest with you. That the VR concepts didn't work.
00:08:51
Speaker
And so they then had to find a way to monetize their model. So Lama no longer became free. And then they started doing things that were extremely toxic, like forcing thousands of their best engineers to go into this AI division to train their model to replace the workforce.
Monetization of AI at Meta and Internal Dissent
00:09:10
Speaker
And so morale absolutely tanked. And the industry, which had, you know, for a minute, considered Zuckerberg almost a human being. Sorry, Zuck, you're kind weird, dude, still, even with the weird. So weird. Like, just, they were popular. They had genuine popularity and support. And they plundered it for the sake of shareholder value.
00:09:32
Speaker
And now they're hated. Now there's an internal revolt. And the CTO, this is the most hilarious part. Close off of this. The CTO comes out and puts out a corporate letter saying, yeah, so we know you guys are upset, but snack rooms, we got snack rooms again. Oh my God. It's like back to like 2010 something.
00:09:52
Speaker
It's like, dude, you're trying ruin their lives. Here is this policy. We are going to force to, we're going to track your mouse activity and your work activity to train AI agents, AKA the replacements for your job. But it's okay because you got Pop-Tarts in the closet.
00:10:13
Speaker
yeah Like what the hell, right? um Anyway, so y'all, this is one thing to consider. i think, I think that the this is the edge of the bubble. This is when the math really starts to hurt.
00:10:28
Speaker
um I think, for example, way back when climate science deniers, right, it was, i I remember telling my friends, I don't care who's denying climate, you know, who's going to change this is going to be insurance companies, right? Because once again, the math will be like, does it make sense to ensure the the Gulf Coast, right? Like the risk is too high, the models, and that and that's it because there's financial interest.
00:10:53
Speaker
I don't think CFOs know how to formulate budgets for a thing that cannot be predicted. Right? there's There's no mechanistic input-output equation for probabilistic models. um And so either people have to turn to smaller, more efficient models that they've either built in-house with the likes of Cohere and Databricks, or they're going to use open source and fine tune it on the inside.
00:11:17
Speaker
This idea that you're going to jam anything and everything through the so-called frontier models is just going to become cost prohibitive until they figure out either a different architecture or a different pricing structure.
00:11:30
Speaker
Anyway, let's move on to the next um in terms of things that we are thinking about and things that we have spoken about. We interviewed Charlotte Duval-Antoine earlier. She is a military historian.
00:11:46
Speaker
we got super nerdy. But what stood out from that was like really close attention to detail, right? When you talk to PhDs, when you talk to, they they have very close study of a subject.
00:11:57
Speaker
And i had put this in the show notes because I increasingly believe, and I think you and I have talked about this, that like there is a new underclass forming and some of it is just based on attention,
Critique of the Attention Economy
00:12:12
Speaker
right? like Your ability to focus on a task and generate market value because you can think creatively through a thing is a real thing. if If you are just ah pushing numbers through spreadsheets and jumping from tab to tab and sharing videos on whatever, like,
00:12:32
Speaker
Eventually you're found out and a lot of that low level activity can be automated anyway. So anyway, I think that's something worth talking about, especially in the zeitgeist as we, we will, we will discuss like screen time and stuff like that are now a serious concern.
00:12:46
Speaker
Any thoughts? Yeah. And I think first of all, like I
00:12:56
Speaker
had to fight back an allergy scenes, excuse me. Yep.
00:13:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think, you know, like um the first thing is we we have to remember that like what you're talking about, you know, it's not a new kind of idea that a lot of lot of pundits who are more socially aware have been talking about this for a little while.
00:13:17
Speaker
But, you know, I think really the attention economy, it has some issues. I think part of it is, you know, I reject it a little bit because the latent individualism and ableism that that that theory holds. right Right. So we're trying to frame attention ah as ah as a know personal moral favor or failure or or an inherent trait that creates know deeply reactionary, like eugenicist eugenicist adjacent view of the working class. Is it really constructive?
00:13:50
Speaker
There are a lot of people, particularly in tech, right? And I'm not saying this like the are the economy where your idea is actually completely bang on. um You know, factory workers, the the manual laborers, that's one.
00:14:02
Speaker
But I think it completely ignores like neurodivergence and ADHD and a lot of the mental realities in today's working class, which is which are debilitating factors for the quality of life and and I'll put it with lot of workers, but also it's the reason why a lot of innovators do what they do.
00:14:21
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Right. So it also leads to a path of like, I'm going to break the programming that, you know, the, the, the one percenters have created out of the system because we have to remember we are in an education system in the West that is made to produce factory workers. It's not yeah made to produce critical thinkers. Right. Right. So when you're not made to follow through that system, which is how a lot of like neurotypical kids feel, like I'm I was one of them.
00:14:49
Speaker
You don't quite fit in the academic program. So you if you can guide your energy correctly, yes, you can perform brilliantly in terms of a report card score. But in terms of how you learn, you're going to bored and you're to be disengaged. Then that attention economy is going to seem like, oh, like you're not like, I, you know, we obviously do show notes and preps for this stuff. Like we're not just sitting here on a Saturday morning, just like brilliant out of nowhere. George K is, but like, I'm not, I'm an idiot.
00:15:17
Speaker
But I think to this, like when I was in school, i got really bored really quick. like greats This is where I parallel. And a lot of my teachers thought I was just like really dumb.
00:15:27
Speaker
they like I remember like my grade seven or grade eight, grade seven teacher thought I wasn't going pass high school. My grade eight teacher. Mm-hmm. it wasn't that I was dumb. I just, I understood it really fast.
00:15:38
Speaker
Right. I was bored as hell. Yes. didn't want to sit in that stupid class. So I'd rather just stare out the window and daydream. Scribble stuff on paper. But that is that is ah that is a form of focus, right? There is a difference between being able to project. And I know that you and I have talked about like the the one vacation you've taken in five years. Like some of it was you staring out at the waves and trying to...
00:16:01
Speaker
yeah really envision your future, that is still way more focused than I've sat on planes next to people five hours of just TikTok, scroll up, scroll up, scroll up, right? Like three second bursts.
00:16:15
Speaker
I get that. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that like, it misrepresents like a lack of focus with a lack of engagement of what you're being forced to do. That's the only caveat I would say. i think in general though, you are correct in that if you are not in a position where you have the idea that you could think about something else yeah that you know, that you're just, this is my job. I'm stuck in this job. Like I've never felt in my life that I'm stuck in any job. Anytime I have, I've like immediately found a way to like get out of it. Cause I yeah don't like feeling trapped.
00:16:51
Speaker
I think a big part of the problem is a lot of society has been trained to accept the reality that they're being presented. And that reality might not be the case, but the the rigging of the game that we exist in in this economy is is built upon, is hinged upon people not questioning what circumstance they've been given.
00:17:14
Speaker
whether it's good, whether it's high, whether it's mid management, whatever it is. And so they have what they have and they're like, all right, cool, that's my place. And I'm like happy with this. Maybe they'll say they wanted something better, but they won't do anything about it.
00:17:26
Speaker
And i think the people who own all the assets make their money off of people always remaining in the status quo and just breaking the thing. That's the end. that's that's how That's how they keep us entrapped.
00:17:39
Speaker
And i i be that being uses yeah yeah I think that's what my objection to is the the design and also, which we're going to get to in a moment, the the shoving down the throats of school systems like, oh, ah students need to be computer
Technology's Role in Education and Critical Thinking
00:17:55
Speaker
literate. So here's Chromebooks for everyone. Here's whatever. Here's shiny objects, right?
00:17:59
Speaker
What does that do if if we know that they employ behavioral scientists and the design is to keep people occupied and glued to screens? It prevents them from asking questions, from daydreaming, from...
00:18:15
Speaker
thinking about weird things and asking questions about it. There's this amazing book by Jonathan Rose called The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class. And these were unions that would put libraries together. And you would follow in this book, these stories of men who, you know, worked in coal mines and were illiterate. And then, you know, within 10 years, they're, they're reading,
00:18:37
Speaker
ah Ancient texts, you know, they're and I guess what I'm trying to say is I i want to believe a life of the mind is it should be ah freely available to any and everyone. And I just think what we're currently living through is not a very deep life. It's a very shallow one because we're just constantly.
00:18:59
Speaker
scrolling and kind of living out other people's thoughts. But to your point, I think it does, it just keeps us pinned down ah into ways that we...
00:19:10
Speaker
It just benefits those in power, right? Like I think for the first, these last five years is like the first time that reading rates have really substantially dipped in college educated people, right? And so it's like a population that does not read and cannot engage with ah but difficult material is one I think that's like very easily manipulated.
00:19:52
Speaker
On to labor. So I think that feels like there's a through line here. um Labor theater is what I called it in our show notes, right? So one of the headlines was in their quarterly report, sorry, quarterly earnings call, Oracle reported that it had shed about 13% of its workforce in fiscal 2026, which is 21,000 jobs. It's a staggering number.
00:20:21
Speaker
And the quote is, the adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted and may continue to result in reductions to our workforce, which is Oracle said in their filing. I think it was the ten k I want to push back on that. And I wrote in the show notes, but did they? Because I am suspicious that the quote unquote adoption and deployment of AI technologies is a very vague phrasing and is not clear.
00:20:50
Speaker
Have you adopted things that automate things inside your company does it deliberately obfuscate? Oh, we're on the hook for like $300 billion dollars worth of data center build out. Yeah.
00:21:03
Speaker
And in order to take on the debt financing who achieve that, we're going to have to let some people go to mess with the balance sheet. Anyway, that's that's that.
00:21:14
Speaker
ah Amazon is also bullish on hiring junior employees and in terms of they don't have bad habits that need to be squashed.
00:21:24
Speaker
And if you arm junior employees, employees with ai technologies their argument is that you get more per dollar value of employee at the same time they've laid off 30 000 people so i don't know george what's going on the labor market is all bad vibes uh i don't i don't know what's going on there but it sounds like there's a lot of hand wavy stuff going on yeah like what i think um
00:21:52
Speaker
I honestly think there's a bit of like a AI human shield at play where yes corporations are laundering bad management through innovation essentially. Right. So, i mean like Oracle explicitly blaming AI and its SEC filing, like really just appeases Wall Street and just hides essentially standard corporate cost. But again, I'm sure that it's the same way.
00:22:14
Speaker
um Jesus. Actually, i think I think it was Oracle, possibly on a previous round, where, you know, they used AI to pick employees to clip that were the closest to their RSU's vesting.
00:22:30
Speaker
Oh, my gosh. So that's that's that's what they they did. and i I was like, to this day, I was like, that is the guttiest, guttiest move that you can... And so for folks who don't understand what we're talking about, your restricted shares when you when you join a company, like...
00:22:45
Speaker
You know, you you, join a company, there's, there's shares in your package, in your package that's like shares of the company, right? That you work with or award it's like almost monetary bonus. And so there's a vesting period where they'll give you the shares, but you have to stay working for a certain amount of time for those shares to vest. So they actually like put the money and invest them.
00:23:03
Speaker
And so the vesting period for a lot of tenured employees, right, for their large share, so the longer you're there, like the more shares you have invested, the more shares best, the more money you have in the company, the more capital you can extract from it.
00:23:16
Speaker
um Right before the vesting period, they used AI to go through their thousands and thousands of employees to find the employees that are closest to their shares reaching that deadline day where they could actually then vest the shares and then the employees could pull up that money out when they leave or at any time really depending on their agreements.
00:23:36
Speaker
So it's not only that that you cut these employees without real regard for their lives or or the actual organization or what you're trying to reorg. It's the duplicitous cost saving of being able to tell your shareholders that you've also shared or saved on having to acquiesce these percentage of shares in the company, which then the ownership still retains.
00:23:57
Speaker
um It's a, it's a complete, like I would, it's not illegal, but it's like grossly unethical. It's horrible. Yes. I mean, also, you know, live by the shareholder, die by the shareholder, right? Because as of this recording, we've also seen a massive tech sell-off as shareholders are getting a little nervous about the amount of spend versus the ah ROI. Yeah. And so if you've done, you've promised the moon and the stars to invest in AI and you took out all this debt financing or you use this, ah these special vehicles, and then suddenly they start asking questions and they start pulling back. I mean, this is, you know, market economics is is not particle physics. There are not fundamental laws.
00:24:44
Speaker
ah It's all vibes and and the vibes can turn very quickly. um But yeah, i I think I would like to highlight, there was a New York Times article about Schneider Electric, huge, you know electrical manufacturing company, and they did not lay anyone off in terms of incorporating ah
Successful AI Integration at Schneider Electric
00:25:04
Speaker
AI. They tried to look for and understand their operational workflows in which they could either augment them or...
00:25:11
Speaker
ah Take something off so that they could focus on the juicy bits that drive business value. And so I think the companies that took their time and tried to understand rather than race in either to capture CNBC headlines or Wall Street Journal, whatever the hell.
00:25:28
Speaker
they are, when that bubble bursts and it's a coming, they are going to be on the right side in terms of where their investments were allocated and actually still being able to drive revenue versus like just betting the farm on Claude's speculation.
00:25:46
Speaker
um But yeah. Yeah, like I do think though we have to think like, because you know, in the notes we're talking about like, like Amazon, for example, still hiring junior employees on the AWS side. I believe genuinely that there's like a, there's a junior dev bait and switch play at at play.
00:26:02
Speaker
And i think it's, the conversation needs to be about exploitation versus churn, right? Because laying off like high earning, and you know how much devs make, they make a ton.
00:26:14
Speaker
High earning mid to senior staff while simultaneously hiring cheaper junior staff, right? This is what Amazon and Oracle and they are doing. It's not an AI replacement.
00:26:24
Speaker
right They're still expecting an obscene amount of manually driven labor or of the human in the loop style of doing vibe coding where like you vibe code, but then you actually have a rigorous QA process that actually produce code that functions.
00:26:39
Speaker
um I really think the whole thing is just a labor devaluation scheme. Again, forgetting to Mark's theory, folks, but I really think they're trying to cheapen labor because they can augment the skill of the institutional knowledge and experience that they pay their high value employees for. So just take a junior in there, give them the right AI suite, give them cursor, give them quad code, whatever it is. And then just make sure that you invest a little bit more on some QA, which you're saving a ton of money on all of your front end, back end devs anyway.
00:27:11
Speaker
So like, from ah From a pure shareholder value perspective, that's illegal, but it's it's a grossly unethical way to run um a software business.
00:27:23
Speaker
Yes, but I think what is frustrating to me is these so-called titans of innovation, it feels like the whole AI move is just optimization at the edges and not actual like true innovation. It's theater. all theater.
00:27:43
Speaker
Right. But like clipping here and there and rounding the corners and whatever to maximize the P&L is different than understanding how humans fundamentally work. And when a senior engineer has institutional knowledge, it's not just that they're like a repo you can query.
00:28:02
Speaker
They also have institutional knowledge about, You know, how does that executive work? How does that line of business interact? They they have a social understanding that can't be jammed into a local LLF, right? So it's like, do you see the value of your employees as a library with which to query? Or do you see the value of the employees as all of the cross-functional stuff that they bring to the table? And I think that's where today's business leadership is very important.
00:28:33
Speaker
techno solutionists like they always think like oh if I just have this app this integration this widget I'm going to be able to make my company work better instead of you know how do I get how do I build a culture that will drive maximum human performance like you and I have talked about you know, yourself, your leadership style is performance coach, right? Hire people who are smarter than you or highly skilled at the thing and then give them the runway and the guidance to do their job very well. And I don't know, is it just seems like
00:29:13
Speaker
That is a very, the techno solutionist standpoint is a very impoverished view of things. It's just not very creative. It's just kind of bean countery.
00:29:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think, don't know, again, like, you can't,
00:29:35
Speaker
You have to look at like where there are issues as well, right? I look at, to your point on the kind of the circular exchange of value. We're also dealing with corporations that have propped themselves up, you know, to try to get to IPO range, but also to prop themselves up by doing circular revenue sharing, right? By that it's like, you know, the handoff deals between Microsoft and NVIDIA, OpenAI and NVIDIA and all that kind of thing, right? Like no one's actually making that new money. They're just, they're all circling the same money. Just moving money around. Yeah.
00:30:05
Speaker
It's the same idea here, right? You're just, you're not trying to actually, creating real value. All you're doing is you're trying to sustain the same capability by just making it cheaper.
00:30:20
Speaker
Right. And it's, it's a bait and switch and it's the same idea. yeah Right. So I think, some of the bigger problems at play, and you've seen this and in in a lot of the breach headlines, when you cut, you know, double digits, like 10 to 15% of your staff in one go and lose all that institutional knowledge, the first thing that goes is your security posture.
00:30:40
Speaker
Because yes any of your knowledge and your your training and all that stuff goes out the window. New employees don't know processes. So it's not that they're being careless, they just don't know and they're fumbling around and they're trying to understand their systems and that's how mistakes happen.
00:30:54
Speaker
And AI can't really patch like conceptual logic flaws. yeah So, you know, if you have something that's created by a rush underpaid junior dev, which is being told, use the tools and produce two and a half times what your predecessor did, they're barely going to make it, if at all.
00:31:12
Speaker
So I don't think it's a story about AI being, quote, ready to take our jobs. I really think at the end of the day, it's a story about corporate executives taking their own workforce stability to play chicken with Wall Street expectations.
00:31:25
Speaker
that yes That's what's happening. Yes. That's well put. That's well put. All right. We will close out with ah not just the present reality, but the future, right? So... I've seen a big movement as a parent around screen time and then also at a macro level, school districts are really rethinking this hyper investment in tech, um both at the behest of parents and also just educators seeing a marked difference in how students can engage with material.
00:31:57
Speaker
um Denmark spending millions of dollars to unwind their investments. So this is worldwide and get books back in the classroom. So they are kind of, I guess you could say that's like a counter investment.
00:32:11
Speaker
But ah anyway, you are not a parent, but wanted to get your thoughts on that. um i I think it's for the good. I think kids will be exposed to tech regardless. I don't think that it has to be kind of institutionalized.
00:32:22
Speaker
in the classroom necessarily. um And I also have a ah couple of other thoughts, but what's what's your take on the the countervailing force in education?
Reducing Tech in Schools for Creativity
00:32:32
Speaker
I think it's brilliant. i think it's brilliant.
00:32:35
Speaker
like look, I don't know about you. don't how your kids are. don't have kids, but i know how to write in cursive. Yes. Yes. I, I, I have books. I have literally thousands and thousands of books. There's like a few hundred here. and there's ah just Despite, despite what your eighth grade teacher told you. Yeah. You know, like I think, again, we talk about this and I think you just had a wonderful camping weekend with your family. I was kind of jealous of that picture you posted.
00:33:06
Speaker
um Like, we grew up at a time where play was still, like, encouraged. Yes. And, like, socialization was encouraged. And, like, let's go out and touch grass and, like, play sports. And, like, the teachers did anything for their own sanity. The teachers did anything possible to get us out of the classroom and outside and, like, not...
00:33:26
Speaker
hope for wasting their energy. um And I think we've kind of lost that because we've, we've overly bubble wrapped everything and everything now has to be like, we, if we thought we were being made to be factory workers before, holy Jesus, now the system that these kids are being put through.
00:33:43
Speaker
Like, they're not giving them the creative freedom to think because we've also, like, safe-spaced away the ability to talk about quote-unquote controversial subjects, which are really necessary to be able to form an understanding of society and how life works.
00:34:01
Speaker
um And I think, again, it's just you have to take away the screens and you have to let the kids go experience things. And I understand, like, funding and blah, blah, blah. Like, education's been horribly defunded. But...
00:34:13
Speaker
There are still things you could do where it's like, hey kids, and we did this in my elementary school, and we did this is high school. It's like there's a local forest and a creek or whatever, right? Just down the street from the school.
00:34:24
Speaker
And the teacher will go out with you or whatever, supervise. But like, let's go and do soil sampling. Let's go look at how like the ecosystem is here. What do you observe? i remember had a science class in grade 10.
00:34:37
Speaker
We had to go outside to the creek by the high school and... we had to sit there and like draw like what we saw. And then we had to go back and do like a presentation. There was a written report had to write, but then there was a presentation you make based on your drawing where you had to describe all the things in the ecosystem that you saw in that image and explain what their relation is to each other.
00:34:57
Speaker
Mm-hmm. That, like it said. requires like very high ordered levels of thinking. But it's a stupidly cheap thing to do that we did all the time.
00:35:10
Speaker
yeah It was like the peak of education. Yes. Yes. And I, and I, I just want to point out, I mean, it's very easy to, i think, boogeyman all of Silicon Valley, so I will be careful here, but it is a culture, right? a lot of these companies come out of a a culture and the stuff that is being learned in the legal discovery phase of these multiple states' attorneys' general lawsuits against snap tick tock youtube and meta is a treasure trove and a peek behind the curtain right so we know that snapchat intentionally sent notifications during school hours intentionally ah incentivized team users to share what they were doing at school In order to capture their attention, it was seen as a market move. If I can capture them at this age, they will be, was like the greater lifetime value of the customer. And that is not in isolation from a lot of things. Like why does Google provide Chromebooks? Yes, they're cheap. Is it altruism or is it like get people used to the design ah nuances of Google Chrome? Yeah.
00:36:22
Speaker
You know, and so I just think we are ah waking up ah from our own techno solutionist fever dream and being like, oh, right, these things cannot do all of the stuff for us and we cannot lean on them to do all of the things for us.
00:36:41
Speaker
So ah we'll wrap there because otherwise we're just guy screaming at the clouds.
Evaluating Screen Time and Life Quality
00:36:47
Speaker
um But let's end with our questions. My question for the week is gonna be much more on the philosophical side than the tech side, which examine your time and ask yourself, what is edifying?
00:37:03
Speaker
You know, is it edifying? do you remember the Netflix movie that you watched while you were looking at your phone and and texting funny memes back and forth? Did you feel enlivened by that? Did you feel a deeper engagement with life because of that?
00:37:19
Speaker
It's not a judgment, but it's a critical consideration. I, too, have been stuck on my phone. When I flew over to London, I couldn't get on the Wi-Fi for the first few hours, and I felt really twitchy, and I was like, oh, this is like Wi-Fi withdrawal. Like, that's a problem.
00:37:33
Speaker
Right? Like, what am I really going to get out of like connecting my phone to the airplane Wi-Fi that I can't get out of the books that I stupidly packed in my backpack? Right. So is it edifying? That's the litmus test. And if it's not, please move. I would highly encourage you to move towards a more edifying life.
00:37:54
Speaker
Yeah, like at the end of the day, like i've I've experienced that. When I flew over to London in March, like I had no Wi-Fi on the way there, like for the Transatlantic part. And I was just like, oh, no one can get a hold of me.
00:38:08
Speaker
was like, oh this is so nice. And so um yeah I relish that. um I think my questions people are to ask yourselves, like, what do you...
00:38:23
Speaker
What are you doing to stay engaged with your life and like live in the present and understand that the only way that you fight a manipulation a lot of these tech companies that are trying to steal your attention to keep you, you know, Subjugated. i'm just going to say that word. Subjugated. system.
00:38:41
Speaker
Like they call it subscription models, but I think it's subjugation. i think it's, it's, it's, there's a bit of an an addiction that they're trying to take advantage of. um You have to break that cycle and you have to ask yourself, well what have I done today? What have I done this week to go outside, touch grass, engage with another human being in person, not just because I have to, because I want to.
00:39:03
Speaker
And what have you done to still feel like a human being? Because i think it's too easy. to fall into the trap and get hypnotized by the monotony of the routine days that the overlords want us to live.
00:39:20
Speaker
So just ask yourselves, what have I done to be human today? What have I done to you know to be human this week?
00:39:28
Speaker
Perfect way to end. Let's wrap there. We will see you next week. right, y'all. Take care. have a good day. If you like this conversation, share it with friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts for a weekly ballistic payload of snark, insights, and laughs.
00:39:45
Speaker
New episodes of Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks drop every Monday. If you're already subscribed, thank you for your support and your swagger. Please consider leaving a rating or a review. it helps others find the show.
00:39:57
Speaker
We'll catch you next week, but until then, stay real.