The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - The Crisis of Adulthood — with John Burn-Murdoch

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Scott Galloway speaks with Financial Times columnist and chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch to unpack the forces reshaping modern life. They discuss why birth rates are collapsing, why fewer young people are forming relationships, and how housing costs, social media, and remote work are changing the path to adulthood. They also explore financial nihilism, the growing divide between young men and women, the impact of AI on work, and what it will take to rebuild connection, purpose, and opportunity for the next generation. Follow John, @jburnmurdoch. Want to listen to this and other episodes ad-free? You can, if you subscribe at profgmedia.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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If I had a Euro for every woman that finds me really unattractive, eventually, women would find me attractive. Pretty sure that's a hate crime. Welcome to the 4002nd episode of the Prop G-Pod. Team Tartin is coming to town. That's right. We're up against Morocco. We are top of the table in our flight, in our match group for a brief time.

Scotland has been in the World Cup 12 times and has never made it past the group stage, only team to have never done so. It's the first time we've been there since 1998. Is that right? 98. So I'm super excited. As you can see, I don't know if you can see. I don't even know if this is televised. I'm wearing the official kit, you wee lass.

I can't wait. I bought jerseys for my boys. They refused to wear them. so I'm going to wear three of them. That'll show them. I'm super excited. I'm going to go to a pub tomorrow night. Anyways, back to me.

Back to me. If, of course, they get knocked out, I'll then be reading for Team England. And then if both of those teams get knocked out, I'll digress to winning for Team USA. Despite being American, I'm kind of sick of America winning everything. But anyways, so excited about the World Cup.

This is McTominy. McTominy, if you don't know who that is, you're going to know who it is by the end of the World Cup. I am just so excited about this. I think the World Cup is doing what the UN was supposed to do, and that is, I don't know, bring us closer together and stop wars. We should just have the World Cup like every – we should have it every year. Why not?

Just have it every year. Okay, enough of that. What's happening in today's episode? We speak with John Byrne Murdoch, a columnist and the chief data reporter for the Financial Times. We discuss why fewer people are having children, how remote work is. changing the social fabric and whether the cost of modern life is making relationships harder to build. One, it's the first time on the pot. I like to think we discover people that other people haven't heard of, and that's not to say that John doesn't do great work and doesn't have his own following,

but I love finding kind of these wonky, insightful people that may be a decent percentage of our listenership hasn't heard from. And this guy's one of them. I'm going to bring them back a bunch. I think it's fantastic. Enjoy our conversation with John Byrne Murdoch. All right, let's bust right into it. Your work at the Financial Times covers a lot of the same terrain we do on this show. Today, we're going to start with a topic. We touch on a lot, but never go as deep as we'd like. And that's the decline, almost the absolute, I don't know, collapse in birth rates.

What does that mean for how we think about solutions? I think this is such an interesting line to draw out here and focus on, because it really changes the conversation quite significantly. For me, when we talk about falling birth rates, we are really talking about increasing singledom and just a decrease the number of young adults who are in happy, stable relationships, period. That, for me, makes this a much broader societal question.

It's no longer about, do happy, stable couples feel that they are in a place where they can have kids? It's about do various, do young, men and women feel like they're in a place where they can couple up. I think it moves the question, moves the conversation, at least in part, away from a focus on the policy levers that governments are used to pushing and pulling, and towards this broader conversation that shows up in all sorts of different data sets and young adults

struggling in this transition from adolescence to adulthood and particularly struggling when it comes to feeling they're in a position to settle down with someone and everything that comes with that. I love this topic. So first off, this really is a quote-unquote big deal, and that is across almost every Western economy, birth rates are plummeting. And why should we care? The population explosion that everyone was worried about in the 70s, that bomb is detonated,

but it's imploded, not exploded. And if we keep increasing the ratio of... old, unproductive, expensive people to young productive people, we're going to see the majority of our tax revenues go to fairly unproductive investment, and that is taking care of an aging, sick population that keeps voting itself more money. So this really is a crisis. This is kind of the boring way an economy collapses. What I got wrong, John, was I thought this was simply a matter of economics, that if you put more money in young people's pockets, it'll have more kids. and they have found that economic incentives in Japan and South Korea and Northern European nations actually haven't had the desired effect.

And I like what you're saying about. The bottom line is at a very basic level, people have kids when they have sex. And when they don't have sex, they don't have kids. And we're in, as Deborah Soe said, we risk sex extinction. And that is young people aren't connecting literally, metaphorically and literally. And, you know, I think there's so many things going. on here. I think the anti-alcohol movement is bad for birth rates. You know, a lot of kids are born accidentally and then you find out, okay, let's have the thing. And then housing prices, it ends up that

housing prices are a form of birth control, that every 10% increase in housing prices, there's a 1% decline in birth rates because housing or buying a house is sort of a, my ex and I bought a house, and then we started thinking, okay, do we paint the second bedroom blue or pink? And let's pull a goalie, right? It's a path towards, it's a path towards having kids. The other thing is, and I want to get your response to this, is that I wonder if the solve is to make having kids more aspirational, making it more, I don't know, I don't know what the term is prestigious, cooler, for lack of a better term. But I'm curious what you think a solve might be here, because it doesn't appear to be just, just money. Any thoughts? Yeah, I mean, one thing on the money side is that

there is some evidence that if the financial bonuses, financial incentives are strong enough, that they do move the needle a little bit, but generally there, we're still talking about what they do is they slow the decline in birth rates rather than actually causing the number to go up. So they may be helping, but they're being drowned out by these broader social and cultural shifts. But I do, do agree with you. I think we're talking here about various different barriers and frictions that come between someone and the point where they are sufficiently secure, stable, relaxed enough to have kids. Housing, as you say, is one of those. But screens, social media, negative stereotypes about the opposite sex, all of these things are quite plausibly

another layer that is stopping people from connecting. On your point about making kids more high status, as it were, to use that framing. I definitely think that could help. But again, I think that kind of assumes that the place we're at is there's loads of happy couples sitting around with no kids. And to be clear, there are some. But by and large, what we're talking about here is just a few people coupling up in the first instance. Or when they are coupling up, they're in these unstable, insecure relationships. Like in many countries now, a couple that moves in together is more likely to break up than to have a kid. And that's never been true until now. So I still think what we almost want to do is make having a girlfriend or boyfriend high status. And, you know,

that sounds ridiculous to say, but on various social media platforms now, there is this idea, certainly for girls and young women at least, that having a boyfriend is kind of lame. And to be clear, you know, there may even be a certain validity to that if you look at it in certain ways. But I do think It's about, you're right to say, it's about these big sweeping narratives as well as the sort of material frictions here. And there's a myth here, right, the far right fomented, in my opinion, a myth that the data doesn't support that this rests at the feet of women who opt for their career at the expense of family and end up childless and unhappy. And the reality is, is that the wealthier of the household, the more likely they are to have kids. Yeah, from country to country to country, it's the same thing. So higher income and more well-educated people, men and women are the ones who are far more likely to end up in those stable relationship,

stable housing, having kids. Almost all of the action here in terms of fewer couples and fewer kids is happening among the poorest and least well educated. And also, and I'm a bit of a hammer that sees nails everywhere, I think a lot of it is we aren't producing enough economically and emotionally viable men. The number one stated reason for terminating a pregnancy is that they don't have a reliable partner. This is something that has been true throughout history, but it's possibly becoming more true. If we think about this in terms of the relative sort of financial economic status of young men and

women, that gap is now closer than it's ever been. And therefore, there are an increasing number of young women, especially again in that sort of bottom half of the income distribution, who look around and say, you know, I don't see any brilliant options here in terms of someone who could promote. provide the financial support, let alone other kinds of support, for me to make this really, really big decision that's going to have a big impact on my life. So it's important to say that there are real financial and economic drivers here. It's just that I think the digital environment often influences how those are perceived. In John, too, sort of less conventional thesis, but I want you to respond to them. I think that possibly remote work in the anti-alcohol movement have resulted in lower birth rates. One and three relationships begin at work and no HR manager wants to admit that. But 99% of those relationships are consensual. I've been to 12 weddings of people that met at my company,

and I had no idea they were sleeping together. But it was a wonderful thing. It was a mitzvah. They met at work, they fell in love, and they got married. And I've gotten some pushback on this, and I understand why. But I wonder if 40% of the pubs and nightclubs closing in the UK since COVID is a form of birth control. Yeah, again, it comes down to opportunities for people to get to know each other.

And especially those situations where you get to know each other, you maybe find a potential partner accidentally, right? And that applies to people who get to know each other at work. It applies to people who get to know each other after having a drink in a way that maybe they wouldn't have done if they hadn't. And, you know, to be clear, and I suspect you feel the same here, we're not advocating heavy alcohol use. There's obviously a lot of the reduction in alcohol consumption

among young people has been positive. But I absolutely agree with you that creating these kind of unstructured, accidental environments where you meet someone you might never otherwise have met, you get to know them. That's the start of all this. A happy, stable relationship and kids are downstream of a lot of sort of unstructured hanging out. And I think you're absolutely right that for various reasons, that unstructured hanging out among young people is happening a lot less than it was a decade or two ago. I love this topic. So let's move on. Young people, nihilism, economic opportunity. Your article makes the point that mental health deterioration among

young adults is primarily, maybe exclusively, an English-speaking world phenomenon. Continental Europe doesn't show the same pattern. What's unique about the English sphere, so to speak, John? I mean, this one is, there will be so many answers to this, and it's very much a question I'm still asking, but one of the answers that I think is almost certainly part of what's going on comes down to housing. In every country talks about the housing crisis, like rents have been rising, house prices rising all over the place, but the impact that's had on young people's housing security does seem to be significantly larger in the English-speaking world. So London, New York, San Francisco, but also Dublin, Sydney, parts of Canada, the share of

young people, let's say people in their late 20s, early 30s who own their home has collapsed. The share of people in that age group who live with their parents has risen significantly. and while housing affordability has also got worse in, let's say, across much of Europe, the impact it has had on that transition into secure, stable, long-term housing to that point where you feel like I've got a stable base now, that impact has been, seems to have been much deeper in the English-speaking world. And I think that is so destabilizing. And there is decent evidence here that at least a portion of the decline in well-being that we see in the English-speaking world, can be explained by that increased insecurity due to people not being

able to leave the parental home or not move into their own home. There's a lot of data showing that people today, young people today on a lot of dimensions, have as much or maybe even more on some levels than young people 30, 40 years ago. And they're not doing as bad as people like me would claim. But the problem is, or the issue is happiness isn't a function of what you have. it's a function of the delta in between what you have and your expectations. And my sense is the expectations are created by 210 notifications a day, telling you if you don't have a boyfriend with ripped ads and haven't made $3 million on the SpaceX IPO or selling and trading East, that you have failed.

And so the expectations, when you see what feels like everyone around you partying in Santropay or flying on a Gulfstream, which is all bullshit, right? I was maintained. Anyone who takes pictures of a private jet does not own a private jet. The feeling that you're failing is just everywhere. And then social media itself

raises the temperature and people are constantly arguing and constantly, it feels like it's literally an esteem-destroying machine. And also, I just don't think we can underestimate the damage that these online platforms

have done to the mental health of young people as these platforms have an economic incentive to separate them from their relationships and their offline relationships and convince them they can have a reasonable fact assembly of life online, which creates isolation, especially among young men, and a lack of reward, a lack of friendship, mentorship, romantic relationships, and they wake up at 30, kind of in their basement, obese, anxious, and depressed. It just senses, it feels like there's so many things setting them up for a lack of self-esteem, a lack of personal esteem, a lack of personal. and unreasonable expectations. Any follow-on comments before we talk about potential solutions?

Yeah, I think, again, that's exactly right. It's this interplay between the material world and the digital world again, right? So by many estimates, the labor market right now for young people is particularly tough. You've got hundreds of applications per job. So you're getting more rejection in the workplace. You're also getting more rejection from dating apps. So there are real negatives here, the housing situation we talked about. But then as you say, that's all refracted through this lens that is constantly both showing you the most successful, or to your point, artificial sense of what your most successful peers are doing.

And it's also highlighting bad things in the world, bad things that may be affect your mental health. So that's exactly right. And it does make the solutions a bit trickier because there are so many facets to this, but I'm sure we'll come on to that shortly. Yeah, I want to talk potentially about some solutions. Some of the research I've seen that says that Singapore and Israel actually have fairly low levels of young adult depression, and that a big component of that is national service, that at a young age, giving kids a sense of purpose and identity in not immediately having their identity being a source of like feeling persecuted or victimized or giving them a reason to not like other people. I'm a Democrat. That's my identity. And anyone who disagrees with me politically is not only saying my arguments are wrong,

they're saying I am wrong as a person. And it creates a, I remember when I don't know about you, but when I was dating, I couldn't tell you what the politics were of that person. We just didn't care. And now everybody just identifies as a special interest group, which unfortunately often involves believing they're either either of them been victimized or other groups are not as worthy as theirs. And national service gives the,

these young people, a sense of unity, a sense of purpose, gets them out of the house, outdoors, working with other people, feeling a sense of purpose, finding friends, mentors, mates, you know, getting good at something, you know, being in service, if you will. So I like the idea of national service. I really like the idea of making sure kids that we ban social media from people under the age of 16. I do think some of it's economic. I think you've got to give kids, young people, a path to housing per your comments. I like some non-traditional solutions, a tax credit for any institution that has dancing.

I read this really interesting thing that no kids don't dance anymore. Dancing is a key component of mating. It happens with all mammals. There's like a ritual period. And no one dances anymore because they're worried about being on camera and they're not drinking. There's just a series of solutions or fixes, whether it's subsidized housing for younger people, national service, encouraging establishments that have dancing and maybe drinking, they get them out of the house, limiting the amount of screen time they have for people as their brain is getting wired through puberty. But like all of these big, big issues, there's no silver bullet. It's a variety of things that need to kind of attack the larger corpus, if you will.

Any thoughts, John? Yeah, I mean, it struck me as you're saying that the common thread that runs to all of those is activities involving other people face to face. Like National Service is obviously an example of that dancing is another. And it feels like we're having this conversation, we're getting as far along as talking about things like National Service, which decade or two, as you say, for people to the left of centre like ourselves would have seemed strange. But interpersonal reaction has declined so much that we're not having to have that conversation. You also reminded me of an analysis I did a couple years back where I found that the activities that young people are spending

significantly less time on today than in the past are A, all the ones that involved other people and B, all the ones that they considered the most meaningful. So parenting gives people an incredible sense of meaning. I've got an almost two-year-old at home at the moment, and that tells you what to wake up and do every day. It tells you who you are today, it tells you who you're going to be next year or in 20 years.

And I do worry that there's this negative feedback loop here where we give people more reasons to feel insecure about themselves. They therefore don't feel secure enough to have a relationship, have kids, and that is depriving them of where a lot of that meaning and security would come from. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Z-biotics. Let's face it, none of us bounce back like we used to,

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So you frame the Gen Z crypto risk-taking behavior, not as irresponsibility, but as a rational response to being locked out of housing, a phenomena called financial nihilism. The evidence suggests that reduced work effort, increased leisure spending, and invests. investment and risky assets are all disproportionately common among young adults with little realistic prospect of buying a home. Walk us through that. Yeah, so this was a really interesting study initially where I saw this identified. And the term financial nihilism as well, I should credit to Demetri Coffinus, who originally coined out a couple years back. But the data here is super interesting. So if you look at detailed consumer spending data, which splits people by age, housing, tenure, relationship status, all of that kind of stuff,

what we see is that a lot of these sort of negative stereotypes of millennials and Gen Z about wasting money on crypto, on conspicuous consumption, on takeout, like expensive takeout every day, that kind of thing. That is happening much more among people who we can see have no realistic prospects of buying a house. For those who are on the brink of affording a house or they've managed to buy a house, they're doing that much less. So we've created this situation where people really can rationally look at their finances and the housing situation around them. And maybe the fact that they don't have a partner either,

they're not worried about supporting a household with kids' mouths to feed. And they think, why don't I just roll the dice here, throws for money at it? And it is simultaneously there's two things there, right? One is that they're saying, well, my only chance of succeeding in an economy that feels as stacked against me as it is, to take high-risk bets. And simultaneously, they're thinking there's no point in me being sensible

with my finances because I don't have one of these big, long-term, looming costs like a house or a family. So there's decent evidence that a lot of these stereotypes of waste and gambling really are downstream

of that same mechanism. Yeah, I thought that maybe, I mean, I was at a music festival and I saw so many young people in the VIP section but the tickets were $2,500. And I asked someone, I said, how can you afford to be here?

And they said, well, we're not saving for a house. You know, they've given up. When I was that age, the first thing I did out of graduate school is I started packing all my money away for a house. That was the next thing. And they've just given up on that, so they go to Coachella. And also, I wonder if,

when I came into my prime income earning years, it was the great financial recession, and we let asset prices fall. We didn't bail out. We bailed out the banks, but we didn't bail out the economy. And so I got to buy Apple, Amazon, and Netflix at, you know, $8, $10, and $12 to share respectively.

Now when asset prices fall, we decide we're going to bail out the incumbents, which is robbing opportunity from young people who want an opportunity for disruption to buy assets on the cheap as they're starting to make money. And so they feel as well, the game is rigged. You guys just keep using my credit card

to prop up your assets artificially that you already own. So I'm going to invent my own asset class. Do you think there's any truth to that, John? Yeah, that certainly rings true to me. And in the UK at the moment, we have this particularly unpleasant twist where millennials, people in their 30s today, had an incredibly tough time trying to buy a house because, again, they landed into that economy with high house prices.

But then when they did manage to get on the housing ladder by like an apartment, that was modestly priced, that class of housing is now loft value. So I think there are so many ways in which that generation has suffered from almost both sides of the same mechanisms. We made it hard for them to get on the housing ladder, now that they're on the ladder, they're at risk of falling into negative equity.

Yeah, I absolutely think that period around the 2010s, so many things changed, so many things happened, which absolutely meaningfully meant that the deck has, been stacked against people of that generation. It's really striking. The other thing I'd love to give a review on, I was watching Japan versus the Netherlands last night in the World Cup. And other than the fact that the Japanese team and fans stick around to clean the stadium,

which I think is the greatest brand-building activity in the history of sport, it just makes you think, I really like Japan. But putting that aside, the, I create. could not get over. It felt like every ad, so maybe it was 50%, was an ad for gambling. I just, I just, I thought, oh my God, it's everywhere. It's literally everywhere.

Thoughts on gambling and what it's done or is doing to our youth. Am I, am I panicking about this, or is it the threat that I think it is? No, I mean, the data on this seems pretty solid, right? been a bunch of studies in the US showing that when different states legalized online gambling or online sports spending, it led to really significant negative impacts in terms of people, very low incomes, spending money either every penny they had or even more on these platforms. In the UK, there's increasingly been regulation of what gambling adverts can be shown during

our domestic soccer leagues. So there's definitely a live discussion here. But yeah, I mean, this is something that destroys, destroys, left, right and center. And what we've seen in the US since 2018-19, we're now seeing in large parts of the developing world. So there are now African countries where gambling revenues are a significant proportion of GDP. So, yeah, I absolutely think this has been a real,

a real scourge of many, many societies. And as you say, the fact that so much of just consuming sport as a young person now is just, you're constantly being baited into this stuff. I think it's, yeah, it's hugely problematic. Let's talk a little bit about the gender divide. You document a 30-point ideological gap between young men and women in both the U.S. and Germany opening in just six years. Historically, generations move together politically because they share formative experiences, but that, that movement or congruence seems to have been broken. What do you think broke it?

This is another one where I just think it's very difficult to explain this without social media having some role. So both in terms of the timings, we see this whether we're looking at the US, Germany, South Korea, the UK. It happens pretty much everywhere starting in the 2010s. That is to say, young women ending up significantly further to the left and right on average compared to young men. And for me, the easiest way to explain this is that to an increasing extent, young men, young women exist in different parts of the internet, different online worlds. There's been really interesting analysis done to prove this out. So when you look at what videos are shown to young men and women on TikTok in the US, for example, you do get these quite distinct clusters. There are certain

clips that will be seen almost entirely by young women and certain clips seen almost entirely by young men. And among those clips, you often see either political content and that doesn't need to be explicitly capital P political, but the kind of content that nudges you in a certain direction, you also occasionally get negative stereotypes about the other sex. So I think we're moving towards this place where people's political ideology, as has always been the case, is shaped in part by the information they consume. You have a large number of young men and women consuming very different types of information, different types of content, and that inevitably, I think, leads to what we see. It feels as if the genders have done a great job convincing themselves it's the other gender's fault.

And there's a lot of misogyny online, really ugly misogyny. That's the bad news. The good news is that I think a lot of people correctly call it out and say, you know, I think of this UFC fight where that fucking idiot gets up there and says the first lady is a man. And social media just weighs in and bats him correct. down. What I also see is a decent amount of misandry, and that is, if you look at, I would argue that the majority of podcasts where there's two female co-hosts, there's this underlying theme that men are irredeemable or incompetent, and that maybe they, the women, are cursed biologically to be attracted to them. But it's a, be clear, it's a curse needing men. And the difference is it doesn't get called out.

If you talk about just how depraved and predatory men are, and I've seen this trend on TikTok where women are coaching other women not to go on dates because it's just too dangerous. So the idea that men are these young men are these violent people looking to kill the women they go on dates with, the data just doesn't support that. You have to choose your word so carefully because if you in any way say these fears are exaggerated, you yourself, the mob comes for you, that you're protecting these men or what have you. But I want to ask you to validate it or nullify that thesis, but any thoughts on this notion that what isn't helping the connection is misogyny and misandry, but I would argue,

you, in most cases, the misogyny is more readily identified than the misandry. Yeah, I think that's clearly true. And you see this around the conversation around the gender divide in general, which is that in most countries, what we've seen actually as young men have not become any more conservative over the last couple of decades. What's changed is young women have moved very, very significantly to the left. And yet, the conversation about the gender divide, typically there's a premise that what's happened is young men moving to the right. That they become Neanderthals. Exactly, exactly. And again, the thing I find striking in the context of the earlier, in the context of our discussion about birth rates and relationships is that the data show that men, well, fathers are doing a larger share of domestic work and child care than ever before. Now again, we're not at 50% yet, and that may never happen. But the average man is actually, by any measure we have, a better partner or potential partner,

than we've ever seen in the data. But as you say, there are still genuine extreme cases which social media amplifies, which means that there is always evidence that someone can point to legitimately as an example of men being terrible. So I completely share your frustration that both with the narratives overall

and the fact that it's so tricky to talk about this in a way that doesn't want to get attacked for suggesting that there is sort of exaggeration going on. Unfortunately, some of the most famous and wealthiest men in the world have not been exactly brand ambassadors for men as a whole. But I do think young men get painted with a really ugly brush. And it's sort of in vogue or fair game to portray men as just awful. And whereas when you do that and there's a lot of that online, it gets called out. In terms of this gender divide, and by the way, I just think I always like to take one big insight

away. It's really what you just said, I felt it, but I didn't know it the way you articulated, and that is men haven't moved to the right, women have moved more progressive. And that is, there's still, there's, the majority of young men still believe in bodily autonomy. They believe in women's rights. Women have moved much more progressive, which is neither, and you can't fault them for. People have their own agency and get to decide. But the movement in the divide has been a function of women going further left, not men going further right. Do you see any differences in this delta between the UK and the US? I think it looks relatively similar. So some of this is a function of political systems and which sort of parties are available for people to support on the left

and right. So in the UK, we now have this fragmented system where you see women more likely to vote for the sort of radically progressive Green Party and young men more likely to vote for the Radical Right Reform Party. But we do, by and largely, pretty similar pattern on both sides of the Atlantic. And that for me suggests that this is a broader sort of shift that's happening. I'd also emphasize that the sort of English-speaking world has its own corner of social media in a way that was much less true before we had social media.

So 15 years ago, young men and women in the US, would have been consuming very different media to young men and women in the UK. Today, there's a huge amount of overlap. We saw that with how the Black Lives Matter movement rapidly spread from the US to the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and less so to other countries.

But yeah, I think we absolutely see it in some of the other shifts we're talking about here. Something is sort of takes hold in the US or maybe the UK and goes across the ocean and we suddenly see similar patterns working their way through very different groups of people in different places. We'll be right back. We're back with more from John Byrne Murdoch. I want to talk about AI and work.

In your work, you suggest that the AI job loss narrative may have been misattributed. The junior hiring pullback started when remote work took off in 2020 well before ChatGPT. and Gen Z, counterintuitively, are the generation most opposed of fully remote work. What is the right policy implication more in-person mandates or something else? This one, again, I think, is super interesting

and relatively poorly understood. So a huge amount of time and effort has been put into looking at whether AI is impacting the labor market situation for young people, but much less work has been devoted to this massive shift over the last six years in terms of the rise of remote work. When you think about it, that it transforms a relationship between worker and employer. It transforms the hiring process.

It transforms how the nature of day-to-day work itself. And very little analysis and study has been done on this. And now we're starting to see a couple studies done. And they do seem to suggest that it is more likely that remote working, especially fully remote jobs have been a big part of the decline in hiring, the disproportionate decline in hiring of young people. Now, again, the fairly consistent conclusion here is not that that means everyone should go back to do it in five days a week.

There's really solid evidence that hybrid working has been pretty good for everyone involved, for the bosses, for the juniors, for everyone. But the less time people are spending the office, the more that work becomes this digital task or set of digital tasks, which, you know, if they can be done by someone hundreds of miles away, then maybe they could be done by a genetic AI. So you get this overlap between moving someone far away, moving away from face to face to interacting through a screen. That happens at the same time as AI comes up, and suddenly it becomes almost second nature to think, well, you know, do we really need that many people who are doing, who are just going to be pinging me documents over Slack?

So I think there's certainly something there, but the way to solve this is probably to go back to more firms where you have three or four days in the office, rather than saying five, which is where you then go over the peak and start getting into other problems. The productivity research, or AI productivity research is especially noisy right now. You have wildly conflicting headlines, studies with different methodologies, people with enormous financial incentives. how do you as a data-driven storyteller cut through that? Like, how do you discern signal from noise? I mean, it's tricky. It's about trying to find the best data with the highest sort of signal-to-noise ratio

every time we asked this question. So a few months ago, the best data we had was the amount of activity that software engineers were performing, those using Agenticaa versus those that weren't. And that gave us a sense that, well, this does seem to be boosted. productivity. People are shipping more code. But a few months later, we're now able to look at that full pipeline, as it were, from lines of code written, pieces of software released to how much

those new pieces of AI-assisted software are actually getting used. And it turns out that when you follow that pipeline to its end, where you really are capturing value, there's been very little uplift at all. So it's constantly challenging. And I see this in my own work as well. I'm a fairly heavy user of the agentic AI tools. And I definitely feel more productive. I'm between me and Claude or Codex, we're producing loads of stuff. But at the end of a week, I look back and I think, well, I still did two articles. And there are so many jobs, I think, where that is true, where activity, sort of low-level activity does not always translate or frequently doesn't translate into high value that you're, in my case, readers or in someone else's case, customers, clients will

consume. So, yeah, I think the question of how much real additional value is being generated by AI is going to continue to be this quite elusive beast, and we will have much better answers even in a couple years than we do today. It's something that's super interesting in your research has highlighted is that while social media creates polarization, AI chatbots actually create deep polarization, moderation, and that every major model nudges users towards more moderate, expert-aligned views, even accounting for sycifancy. Can you say more about this? Yeah, so I find this stuff, I think this is a really important question to ask, is any new,

sort of new media form comes in and spreads across society? So certain types of media, tend to bring people towards the middle, and this has been true across histories, other ones sort of elevate fringe voices. So if you think about things like books or newspapers, back when the printing press first came around, you were essentially, because of the capital costs of starting up

a newspaper publication or a book publisher, you are by default favoring, like, establishment mainstream voices. And that's not to make a value judgment about whether that's good or bad, but that's kind of the impact that that had. Similarly, when television first came out, you had a small number of channels, again, because of the costs involved

and because of regulation, so they tended to elevate mainstream voices, at least at first. What we then had with social media is something that is fundamentally polarising. It breaks through that establishment layer because anyone, anywhere, can post to social media. It therefore elevates those fringe views.

It amplifies negativity far more so than many other media forms did in the past. AI is this really interesting case where we seem to be going back to a moderating establishment-favoring media where this seems to be happening for a few different reasons. So one is that the information that these models are trained on, a huge amount of that has come from mainstream trusted sources.

Additionally, you have the fact that the business model for AI tools It's quite different to social media. So social media, like most of the digital media innovations of the last 15 years, ended up being predominantly ad-funded. So it was all about attention. It was all about eyeballs, and therefore you're incentivized to, say, sensationalist things, shocking things. AI, the winning business model seems to be making it very useful for people in the business world. That means the inner workings of this technology reward being correct.

there's not much point having an AI tool which tells you what you want to hear if that's going to mean it tells you the wrong thing you put the wrong thing in your report you give your investors the wrong information so all of these subtleties about how the technology differs mean that when you ask or when you talk to these AI tools and different models about issues of politics and ideology and I don't necessarily mean explicitly asking them these questions but as these issues come up from time to time in different conversations, they tend to give you fairly mainstream, straight down the middle, moderate answers. And therefore, to the extent that these conversations do end up shaping how

people think about the world, they will hopefully, and the evidence suggests, they will bring people back away from those fringe extreme views and towards a more factual view of the world. Your charts have almost become as recognizable as your byline. People share them without the article. The key to success is great storytelling, or I would argue that's a core confidence, and you seem to tell great stories through your charts. What's your selection process for which chart you're going to sort of lead with? Honestly, I'm always trying to think, why would this be interesting to someone and how many people would find this interesting? So I will, as I'm doing my analysis, I'll be generating like, I don't know, 20 charts per piece of work that I'm working on

just as I go through that process. And then with each of those charts, I'm thinking, well, is this interesting? Is this only interesting to me, or could this be interesting to more people? Is this telling people something they already know or telling them something new? And if it is telling someone something they already knew, that's not necessarily a bad thing,

if it's really crystallizing this vague idea they had. But yeah, all sorts of trade-offs and decisions around that, but fundamentally based on this idea of thinking, how can I make this speak to as many people as possible? You've been covering these generational trends for years, and the through line, quite frankly, feels pretty bleak. And I would argue, and I won't say this about you, I'll say it about me. The temptation to catastrophize and be bleak is really seductive for, quote-unquote, thought leaders, or academics, because quite frankly, it just makes for a more interesting talk.

Sort of if you were just to be, have fidelity to history, our talks would be, you know what, Today, everything just got a wee bit better. And that's just not that interesting. It's much more interesting to talk about, and I'm not suggesting these issues aren't real, but I find myself, one, I'm naturally a depressed and angry person, so it's easy for me to catastrophize, but there's economic incentive in it. And that is, you just sound more interesting to talk about the problems. You've been talking about the general trend lines in, you know, mostly about youth, isolation,

cognitive decline, economic dislocation, falling birth rates. Do you think it's getting worse, or do you think that there's signs, I won't say hope, because everyone will bust into the thing, well, I'm an optimist, but do you think things really, where do you think we are in the curve of youth well-being? I honestly think we're probably past the bottom. I think that partly for the reasons we said about how AI could potentially shape the sort of social discourse and that kind of things in a healthier way or at least a less unhealthy way than social media. I've also written about how there's early suggestive evidence that people's screen time and social media

time may be falling, which I think would be very beneficial if people then start using that time to interact face to face. I think on housing, you know, it's always possible for things to get even worse, but I do think we're now having a conversation where there's an appreciation that this is something we really need to address and fix. And there are governments and policy makers in all sorts of different parts of the world starting to increasingly take this seriously. Yeah, I'm optimistic about that. I guess the pessimistic side that I'm competing against there is if AI does turn out to have this sustained negative impact on young people's employment, that would be a material negative shift, that it would be very hard for all of these more

subtle sociocultural shifts to wave away. But yeah, look, I try, I completely agree with you. The incentives here are to tell sort of surprising negative stories, but I do try to remain fully aware of that and look for the positive and more optimistic stories where they exist. I'm sure you get this question a lot, and it's one I get. And it's the following regarding the UK. What's wrong here? So many of the pillars of a stronger growth economy, great education, great culture, global influence. It's not a uniquely European thing. Sweden is growing. Productivity in the Netherlands is up. The UK is a real laggard. If you were to attempt to identify what ails the UK, what is wrong here? How do you answer that? Look, again, there's going to be so many,

the answers to a question like this, but certainly two big ones that I would point to immediately are one is the sort of planning and permitting system here, which has, which really makes countries like the US where that's also a conversation look like rookies. You know, the restrictions on house building in the UK are extraordinary. There are huge areas of land around London, around Manchester, around Birmingham, are major cities where you are simply not allowed to build, called the Green Belt. We apply similar restrictions or similarly severe restrictions to building infrastructure. We have some of the highest infrastructure costs in the world and the longest delays in the world,

affecting transport, affecting energy. That gives us some of the highest energy prices in the developed world. All of these make it harder for people, companies, you name it, to locate in the UK or in the most productive parts of the UK. The second factor, I would say, is that over-centralisation of how things, things that are done in the country. So one of the things I think the US does pretty well is state and local governments can raise their own taxes. That gives them strong incentives to build, to innovate, to try and run things better than the neighbouring state. In the UK, we by and large, don't have that. Overwhelmingly, things, even at the local level are effectively run by the central government.

That discourages one city to try to do things differently from another. Most of the tax-raising mechanisms again happen in a similar way. So local governments in the UK are similarly not incentivized to build housing to raise revenue in the way they are in the U.S. So I think permitting and centralization would probably the biggest two I would point to. I struggle with, and I want to get your thoughts on this, I struggle on whether SpaceX is a good or a bad thing. And the answer is probably yes. the wealth creation, the innovation, the economic growth, the inspiration, is just inspiring. At the same time, I feel a lot of it is manufactured scarcity, the archetype of heroism resulting in what feels like could be a pretty big transfer of wealth from retail investors

to an even smaller group of people, thereby increasing income inequality and an economy me that seems to be more about finding a way to do ultimately a bag drop. I'm curious to just get your views on the, if you will, SpaceX and the first trillionaire, the goods, you know, the positives and the negatives of that. I will just say as a Brit here, it's interesting that at least for a large number of Americans, they are invested in the stock market. So if SpaceX is a huge success, they're going to share to that, sharing that to an extent, whereas in the UK that is much less true. And so if Musk and Elon Musk and SpaceX make a huge amount of money, that is going to be much less shared via the stock market for people in the UK and Europe. But yeah, it's a really tricky one.

Like the rhetorical impact of the existence of a trillionaire is obviously enormous. And I can understand why there has been such a reaction to that number and that event as crossing that line. But at the same time, my general view on things like inequality and wealth is that if people do share in the proceeds, I don't think it should matter that a small number of individuals hold a large amount of that wealth. Now, I don't think the concentration, the amount held by that small number should keep going up. but my general view is that if innovation wealth and the incentives of creating innovation wealth lead everyone to get richer then I'm broadly agnostic about that and I would say there's decent evidence that living standards for those in the bottom 10% of the US have also been doing reasonably well over the relatively recent years certainly better than the bottom 10% of the UK so yeah I understand

why the existence of the first trillionaire causes so much anger and sense of injustice. But my hope would be that regulation, redistribution ensures that as broad a section of society as possible can still benefit from this. John Byrne Murdoch is a columnist and the chief data reporter for the Financial Times. John, I love this conversation.

Thanks for your time today. Thank you so much, having me. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Gennar. Camryek is our social producer, Bianca Rosario Ramirez is our video editor. And Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropGPod from PropG Media.