Azeem Azhar

And so they might flake out after six or nine months.

So again, why not just whip the 45-year-old for a few more years?

So that was Eric's argument, and the paper was called The Canaries in the Coal Mine.

It did really well.

Understandably, I thought it was a great piece of work.

The buts, and I think this is why it becomes complex, this discussion about what are we actually seeing.

So the buts from my side were, number one, it felt really early for chat GPT and gen AI, which are not even three years old, to exist.

effect hiring.

I mean, I've worked with big companies.

They do not move with the degree of alacrity that you might expect.

So that was my first challenge to Eric.

The second challenge was simply the idea that sometimes, especially if you're having to sail uncertainty, you may have overhired in previous years during COVID, you may have cost concerns.

It's much easier to not hire a 24-year-old than it is to fire a 44-year-old.

So as a manager, you like water, you'll take the path of least resistance.

I suppose the third argument was really what are we seeing here?

Because a few weeks later, the Yale Budget Lab or Yale Economics Lab came out and said, well, we've looked at widespread data and we can't see these effects at all.

Now, of course, Eric and Bharat's effects, as they described in Canaries and a Coal Mine, was highly, highly plausible, right?

It makes it lots of mental models we might have had.

But equally, there are mental models and arguments that I've put forward that might be as credible.

So when you look at that through your lens, how would you disentangle