Patrick McKenzie

So the true economic impact is probably larger than that.

There are probably people who have the inverse of that spreadsheet where it's like, darn it.

we got quoted a petty 11 against us again, but like, because you know, we got these numbers and there's only like a few firms in the tech industry that do hire scaling it, you know, scale hiring anyhow.

I've met many young and talented people over the course of 20 years in the software industry and young and talented people continue being young and talented.

I think one thing that is partially explanatory is that when there's a new frontier that opens up, the existing incumbents, both in terms of institutions and in terms of people with deep professional networks and personal resources and similar, do not immediately grab all the value in that new thing.

It's Terra Nova.

And so to the extent that tech is no longer Terra Nova, I think you would expect less people who are less resourced, who are younger, et cetera, to rise to the heights of prominence in tech.

To be clear, I'm not as tight of prominence in tech.

And when I ran companies, I was not running companies like some other guest's podcast run companies.

It was bingo card creator.

I was making bingo cards for elementary school teachers while living next to a rice paddy in central Japan.

But that's kind of like my dominant hypothesis.

There are, you know,

some things that are affecting the youth that I think are negative.

I think some products that the tech industry has created do not maximize for the happiness or productivity of people that consume those products, TikTok, et cetera.

But, you know, I continue to be bullish about the youth and I have two children who knock on wood will accomplish things in their lives.

And so I'm intrinsically skeptical about, oh, the kids these days, they're just bad kids.

Oh, goodness.

I don't know about the productivity numbers generally.

I do know that Steam keeps a counter of how much I am playing video games in a given time.