There’s something delightfully ridiculous about a major Australian bank charging its own staff $10 for a sausage sizzle. When I first heard about ANZ’s “silly sausage” incident, I had to read it twice to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding. A sausage sizzle – that quintessential Aussie institution usually reserved for Bunnings fundraisers and school fetes – being monetized at $10 a pop for employees at a corporate event? It’s almost too perfect a metaphor for modern corporate culture.

I’ve been mulling over something that’s been nagging at me for a while now, and a recent online discussion really crystallised it: Australia’s economy has essentially become a hedge fund for residential real estate, propped up by a protected banking oligopoly. Four of the top five companies on the ASX 200 are banks – CBA, Westpac, NAB, and ANZ – with BHP being the lone miner in that exclusive club. When you step back and look at it, that’s genuinely bonkers.

There’s been an interesting pattern emerging lately that’s got me thinking over my morning latte. Engineers and researchers at major AI companies – people at the absolute cutting edge of this technology – are leaving to study philosophy. And poetry. Not to start new ventures or pivot to another tech role, but to genuinely step away and contemplate what they’ve been building.

The latest case involves someone from Anthropic who’d just finished their PhD a couple of years ago, now departing to study poetry. Jack Clark, a co-founder at Anthropic, left to pursue philosophy. These aren’t burnt-out junior developers looking for a career change. These are people who’ve been staring into the depths of what these systems can do, and something about that experience has fundamentally shifted their perspective.