That was one of my favorite movies coming up. I later got to meet Ben Stiller, who shot me a ‘Blue Steel’ tweet during one of my campaigns. It was a highlight.

A little more than eight years ago, I started running for President in February of 2018. My campaign was announced with a NYTimes article called, “The Robots are Coming.”

No one cared.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. I only later learned that trying to get someone’s attention about a presidential race almost 36 months ahead of the general election was something of a fool’s errand. Just about all of the other candidates would declare after the midterms that November. There’s an ebb and flow to these things, and energy around the presidential only started running hot in mid-2019 when televised debates hit the airwaves.

In my case, the 12 months or so to have the field to myself were a godsend. I got to get comfortable campaigning, hone the message, build a little bit of a following and get my feet under me. Heck, in my case the biggest thing was getting added to the polls at all, which required me stumping around Iowa and New Hampshire for months in order to register.

Thank you if you were a part of that campaign. I was anonymous when it launched and together we mainstreamed a number of ideas that are all the more relevant today.

The energy maxed out in 2020 when the voting started. There were crowds everywhere I went, and my job was to rev them up. I compared it to holding a live wire, where you’re channeling a movement and trying to grow it.

My day-to-day was a barometer for how we were doing. People recognize you on the street and give you a thumbs up? That’s a great sign. I would see MATH hats in the wild routinely. You could actually feel for yourself what was happening in real-time.

It’s hard to believe that six years have passed. The past six years have been busy. I wrote a book or two, started a company and kicked off a political party. But not much compares with the electricity of a presidential campaign. My wife Evelyn recently pulled up a video of me saying “Chant my name!” in jest to a crowd of hundreds at a rally in Washington D.C.

I’m not someone who chases the energy in that way – I’m not naturally an extrovert or an adrenaline junkie. My idea of a great time is reading and writing, or spending time with my family. I didn’t run in 2020 to gain notoriety, but instead to advance solutions I believed would be necessary.

Lately, I’ve felt the energy around me picking up again.

Maybe it’s because AI is on everyone’s minds. Maybe it’s because several of my takes – AI eating the jobs, the need for UBI, the polarization of the two-party system, Joe Biden needing a primary – have aged well. Maybe it’s because more and more people are waking up to the deteriorating state of our institutions.

A friend over dinner complimented me the other night and said, “Somehow, you’ve managed to stay relevant pretty much the whole time since 2020.”

It was a nice sentiment, though I’m not sure he’s completely right. Sometimes it’s something you do, and sometimes the wave comes to you. When it comes, you do all you can to ride it.

Okay, you’ve seen the Noble Mobile promo, but this is a big deal – for a limited time only you can get 6 months off your mobile bill through April 30. Email matt@noblemobile.com and use my name to collect what is objectively an outstanding value that will help you save for your family and your future. A new study just came out showing that time off of Instagram and Facebook improves your mood dramatically. The Hudson Valley Ideas Fest returns to Rosendale, NY on April 25th. Go outside and look up.

I spoke at the University at Albany last week and met with a number of students. They were bright and thinking about their future. A couple of them said they wanted to go to law school.

I responded, “If you go, try to find an inexpensive way to get your degree. I’m not sure the numbers will work out.” We went through the math. Maybe $80k a year for tuition, room and board. Times 3 = $240,000 in debt. How much would you have to make for that to make sense - and would that job be waiting for them in 4 years? I was openly dubious but didn’t want to be a jackass raining on their ambition. It’s good that they even had an ambition, after all.

But it left me thinking about just how rough it’s going to be for the next generation.

“Things have gotten so much worse in the last 10 years.” This is what the CEO of a major AI-enabled company said to me this week. His company has tripled its revenue in the last few years. But he’s cutting staff and sounding the alarm about AI. “The truth is, the faster we replace people, the better we will do.” He’s for a negative income tax to give people a floor paid for by AI-fueled profits.

His summary of the situation in three words: “With the help of AI, capital displaces labor.”

That’s actually the best distillation of the moment we’re in.

Also this idea: “The easiest people to fire are those you haven’t hired yet.” It’s one reason why college students are going into the most unwelcoming job market in a generation.

I wrote last week about unemployed and underemployed college graduates. I said in 2019 “coders will definitely be automated.” I knew that was the case because what coders do is highly structured and rules-based, sort of like the corporate law contracts I reviewed in my twenties, and I knew that highly structured rules-based work would be catnip for AI.

“A lot of corporate workers are there to maintain a legacy system or manage a project that isn’t core to the company’s work,” a tech executive commented to me. “Maybe 25% are touching something vital to what the company is doing right now.” That leaves 75% scrambling to justify their role. The end of the office will be painful.

“AI is going to push millions of people up or down a class. People don’t take that well.” That’s what an AI executive said to me over dinner.

Capitalism plus AI will be no one’s idea of a good time.

I’m pretty sure the numbers will show that entrepreneurship is going to rise, simply because there will be a ton of unemployed college grads and techies and others and they’ll have no choice. I love entrepreneurship as it can bring out the best in people. But for every successful startup, there will be 9 or 10 failures. Starting a business is not for everyone, and this environment will be unforgiving as the work gets stripped away.

The footwear company Allbirds pivoted to AI and its stock popped 700%. Maybe your shoes will tell you that your feet stink.

The water level is going to rise quickly. Appreciate what you’ve got, build a boat as best you can and try to bring others in.

You know something we can all do better on? Our data. Go to noblemobile.com/yang for 3 months off your wireless bill, the best deal around that will also reduce your screen time and help you save for your family. Email matt@noblemobile.com to get a human being. A new study just came out showing that time off of Instagram and Facebook improves your mood dramatically. I interview Princeton neuroscientist turned Congressional candidate Sam Wang on the podcast this week. The Hudson Valley Ideas Fest returns to Rosendale, NY on April 25th. Go outside and look up.

This week on the podcast I interview Noam Scheiber, the author of “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class.” Noam painstakingly interviewed and followed college-educated employees who tried to unionize stores and warehouses at Starbucks, Apple and Amazon for several years. He also followed a young Hollywood writer who was part of the 2023 strike.

“I showed up at one of the first Starbucks stores that tried to unionize in 2021 in Buffalo,” Noam relates. “I noticed that a lot of the unionizing workers were college graduates who had showed up to Starbucks as an interim gig but then found themselves there for years. I thought there was something to dig into.” He wound up following one Starbucks employee, Teddy Hoffman, for three years who had been working at a Chicago Starbucks location after graduating from Grinnell College as Teddy’s store voted to unionize.

“Underemployment of college graduates is all over the news today because of AI,” Noam says, “but the truth is that it’s a trend that has been building for years. A lot of college grads went to work at Starbucks or Apple as a waystation job before the pandemic until they could get the kind of job they got a degree for, but instead found themselves semi-permanently part of the retail workforce.” Indeed, Teddy had already been working at Starbucks for seven years with his degrees in Theatre and English before unionizing, though he eventually became a teacher. “Because they’re college-educated, they have a certain worldview and confidence about them. I was impressed when they would just look up the details of the National Labor Relations Act, for example, to see what employers could and couldn’t do.”

Where there were fewer college graduates, there were more social and cultural barriers to organizing. “Each Starbucks store was kind of the same in terms of the makeup of their employees,” Noam observes. “This is one reason why unionization at Starbuck stores spread to 650 locations, while at Amazon, it hasn’t translated to multiple fulfillment centers.” The 650 Starbucks stores in the U.S. represent about 6.5% of Starbucks’ 10,000 locations in the U.S.

One of the admirable aspects of Noam’s book is that it doesn’t sugarcoat how hard it is to unionize in these environments. “Technically, employers aren’t allowed to discriminate against workers who are looking to unionize. But any grievance with the National Labor Relations Board can take years, during which a lot of these employees might have already moved on. And employers can all of a sudden start enforcing rules that were always on the books that can make an environment very unpleasant or increase benefits for non-unionized stores.” For example, a worker could get fired or disciplined for being 5 minutes late because there’s a rule against tardiness that ordinarily doesn’t get enforced, or non-union employees could get a new benefit that unionizing stores don’t get because any new benefit has to be collectively bargained.

Indeed, the human aspect of “Mutiny” is its most compelling aspect; seeing Teddy and other retail workers try to organize over months and years makes you feel for them. Teddy becomes a father for the first time, and he and his wife apply for government benefits because money is short and Starbucks has reduced his hours. But he continues on because he wants to see the campaign through.

So what lies ahead? Noam says, “One thing I can say with confidence is that this population is going to change our politics. Young college graduates voted for Zohran Mamdani, for example, at a rate of 84%. When do you see a number that high?” Indeed, one of Peter Turchin’s conditions for revolution is an oversupply of elites. The ambitions of young people can go dark pretty quickly when the future they were promised fails to materialize, which is unfortunately going to be the case for more and more of them as 42% are currently underemployed - and rising.

When I ran for President I was more likely to talk about truckers or retail workers than I was college grads being displaced by AI. But every 23-year old who returns home to their parents' house with stifled ambitions and deferred dreams represents a big lost opportunity. As that becomes the new normal, the costs to both the individuals concerned and the country will be profound.

For a link to Noam’s book, click here and for my convo with him click here. I started a wireless company that will reduce your time on social media and save the average American $500 a year. Go to noblemobile.com/yang for 3 months off your wireless bill, the best deal around that will also reduce your screentime and help you save for your family or email matt@noblemobile.com to get a human being. The Hudson Valley Ideas Fest returns to Rosendale, NY on April 25th. Go outside and look up.

I’m not someone who enjoys cancel culture or a rush to judgment. But when the news came out I thought that he should drop out. I wasn’t alone as every endorser abandoned him very publicly and his staff deserted him en masse.

I met Eric multiple times when he and I were both running for President; we saw each other campaigning in Iowa where he was born. His number is in my phone. Eric made the first debate in 2019, which he spent challenging Joe Biden to ‘pass the torch’ and quoting Joe in his first Senate campaign saying that the incumbent was too old and out of touch and it was time to give way to the next generation. Joe came up to him during a commercial break, took Eric by both lapels, and said to him “nice try, I’m not going anywhere.” Eric then dropped out a few days later.

After 2020, Eric became a fixture on cable news programs, particularly MSNBC and CNN, mouthing Democratic talking points. He burnished his social media following. In 2024, when Joe Biden’s age became one of the central issues of the day and Dean Phillips tried to force a primary, Eric was nowhere to be found. He had gotten the message that being a good partisan soldier was a better path.

His approach worked, as he became the frontrunner to become Governor of California after Kamala Harris and Alex Padilla passed up runs for the position.

I was surprised by this; Eric is a bit of a lightweight. He’s not an intellect or a deep policy thinker. He’s sort of a normal-ish telegenic guy who found a path in politics.

As you can imagine, running for President requires a number of character traits: vision, intellect, confidence, conviction, communication ability, charisma, maybe even morality or principle.

I didn’t find Eric to be remarkable on any of these qualities. He’s just a dude. He was in way over his head running for President. He recently has come under some heat for not maintaining a house in his district; I think he just didn’t have the money to have one home in D.C. and another place in northern California. His net worth in 2018 was reported to be negative due to student loans and is more recently listed at around $400,000. His Congressional salary of $174,000 has been the family’s main source of income.

Apparently, Eric’s being a creep toward young women was kind of an open secret in DC and California circles. I was nowhere near that stuff. But as soon as the news came out, I thought, “Yeah, that tracks.” There’s no way in my mind it was all fabricated. His denial/non-denial video only seemed to make things worse. His suspension was a formality after just about everyone associated with his campaign abandoned him.

Best case for Eric, in my opinion, is that he doesn’t get drummed out of Congress by his colleagues – which I think he probably will be – but that he then loses his seat in a couple years when someone is in position to challenge him. His days as a cable news presence are over and he’s likely done as a politician. My heart goes out to his wife and 3 kids, who now have his behavior splayed out on news programs for all to see. It’s going to be devastating for his family.

I sometimes think of some of the other figures from my presidential primary ‘class,’ many of whom I’m loosely in touch with. I feel like Eric is Icarus from the Greek myths; he flew too close to the sun, and now he’s crashed to Earth. Human failure and frailty take multiple forms. I hope his family is okay, and that those closest to them in real life can get them the help they are going to need.

You know who my pick for Governor of California is? Matt Mahan! You can hear my interview with Matt here or read my post on him here. You know something we can all do better on? Our data. Go to noblemobile.com/yang for 3 months off your wireless bill, the best deal around that will also reduce your screen time and help you save for your family. Email matt@noblemobile.com to get a human being. The Hudson Valley Ideas Fest returns to Rosendale, NY on April 25th. Go outside and look up.

As you probably know, I run a wireless company, Noble Mobile, that pays people to use their phones less. It’s clicked with people in part because we are all struggling with our relationship with our phones, what Hasan Minhaj calls our ‘rectangles of sadness.’ Noble today has thousands of subscribers and millions of annual revenue - thank you if you’ve been an early adopter!

How bad is your screen time? Well I’m proud to announce that starting today, you can find out! Introducing the Brain Rot Index (BRI), now in the free Noble Life app.

Your BRI is a daily score that tracks your phone pickups, screen time, and social media usage — and tells you exactly how rotted your brain is getting. If you’ve wondered how good or bad your phone use is, this is for you. For fun, if your score is in the acceptable range you can earn up to $100, plus 5.5% annual growth on your balance, on Noble.

Getting started takes about 60 seconds:
1. Download the Noble Life app
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I founded Noble because millions of Americans are overpaying for wireless and losing hours of our lives to our phones. The hidden tax comes to over $100 billion a year and much more when you factor in our time and attention. This is a way to put money and time back in people’s pockets right now.

What’s my Brain Rot Index? Let’s just say that you will probably do better than I do. :)

Look Up.

– Andrew

We have Offline events coming up in LA and New York, as well as the Hudson Valley Ideas Fest later in April. Go to noblemobile.com/yang for 3 months off your wireless bill, the best deal around, or email matt@noblemobile.com to get a human being. On the podcast on Monday I talk to the author of ‘Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class’ Noam Scheiber. Be present and try to look out for people in your boat.

This is tectonic. Those 30,000 workers cost about $8 billion a year. The message is clear – fewer human salaries, more data centers. The amount of money spent on building data centers recently surpassed the amount of money spent on office buildings for the first time.

The server farm is the new human.

Also last week, OpenAI announced it was raising $122 billion at a staggering $852 billion valuation, the heftiest raise for a private company in history. This seemed like an incredible vote of confidence in its business.

But if you dug a little deeper, you’d see that the vast majority of this $122 billion - $110 billion – came from only 3 companies: Amazon with $50 billion, Nvidia for $30 billion, and SoftBank for $30 billion. These companies are all already massive investors and partners to OpenAI – they need it to succeed for their own sakes. Only $12 billion came from other entities and individuals, including Microsoft which has already invested billions in OpenAI.

This reminded me of a business joke: “If I owe you one million dollars, I’m in trouble. If I owe you a billion dollars... you’re in trouble.”

Microsoft, Nvidia and SoftBank are so deep in hock to OpenAI that they need it to succeed.

OpenAI recently abandoned its much-hyped Sora AI-for-video offering despite high-profile partnerships with Disney and other media companies. There wasn’t that much demand, but the costs of the computing resources for Sora were at least a million dollars a day. Hence, they pulled the plug.

Instead, last week OpenAI acquired the technology YouTube / X show TBPN. I appeared on TBPN a few months ago to talk about Noble Mobile. Why is an AI company acquiring a new media channel for hundreds of millions of dollars?

It’s a great question. The answer, in my mind, clearly seems to be to try and shape the narrative among techies around AI and OpenAI.

It’s not a normal business practice and it doesn’t make much sense in a normal world; if your business is AI, why buy a media mouthpiece? That’s... just weird.

Of course, if your stock is now valued at $852 billion, you can spend a couple hundred million on some YouTubers / X broadcasters without it being too big a deal.

But still, I find this to be something that raises more questions than it answers.

OpenAI touted its massive revenue growth – up to $2 billion a month. ChatGPT remains dominant among non-business users even as OpenAI is trying to gain traction with companies.

OpenAI’s competitor, Anthropic, is now preparing to go public in one of the biggest IPOs ever. The folks I know use ‘Claude’ as shorthand for their ass-kicking colleague in the enterprise setting. This is where OpenAI wants to be.

What are the takeaways? First, the scale of investment in AI is now so breathtaking that people are just incidental costs. Data centers are the new offices. Layoffs are the go-to move for big companies trying to take advantage of AI and will only pick up steam.

Second, in order for OpenAI to justify its new valuation, it will need to increase revenue by an additional tens of billions of dollars, which suggests to me that either it’s going to replace a huge chunk of the workforce, or it’s going to fall short of its current projections. Or maybe both.

Finally, OpenAI is the new ‘too big to fail’ company, similar to the big banks during the mortgage meltdown. Of course, the banks wound up with the federal government as a backstop. If OpenAI ever needs the Feds to step in... the market will be in big trouble.

None of this is good news. Be prepared for strange – and tough - times for people ahead.

Would you believe I started a wireless company that will reduce your time on social media and save you up to $1,000 a year? Go to noblemobile.com/yang for 3 months off your wireless bill, the best deal around that will also reduce your screen-time and help you save for your family or email matt@noblemobile.com to get a human being. I interview Mindy Finn on why she joined Forward on the podcast this week. The Hudson Valley Ideas Fest returns to Rosendale, NY on April 25th. Go outside and look up.

Yes, this feels frivolous. There’s some part of me that is like, “Man, AI is going to kick off an automation wave unlike anything we’ve ever seen. How are you paying attention to sports at a time like this?”

Now, I know that’s harsh. We all have to enjoy life and appreciate what we have while we have it. I find that I’m more effective when I’m positive.

But there’s something that’s gnawing at me that I’m going to try to express.

9 times out of 10 when we log on or turn on the TV, we are looking at the winners.

The State of the Union, our pro athletes, performers, actors, even influencers and writers. Most people we see and track are at the top of a pyramid, outliers and anomalies.

It distorts our sense of what’s happening.

Perhaps revealing of me - I have a grotesque fascination with pro athletes and celebrities who have gone broke. I watched a couple YouTube videos of this variety and now they get served to me all of the time.

If 10 million white-collar workers were to get kicked to the curb, what would we see change? In the real world, things would be different. The offices would be emptier and our neighborhoods bleaker. Maybe our neighbors would have to sell their house and our friends would need some help. Maybe we would too. But the media and social media we see would probably look just about the same.

One of my great learnings these past years has been that our media organizations are terrible at telling us what’s actually going on out there. Our news networks have become chroniclers of the news-of-the-day in your preferred lighting and flavor. The American standard of living has slipped so far over the past number of years – a record 57% of us are pessimistic and 70% are having trouble affording a decent life – with very little meaningful genuine coverage. I sometimes think that instead of all of the hours of talking headery we are subject to, we should just get graphs and bar charts showing how we are doing free of distractions or commentary.

Yet our favorite anchors have to go out there and perform their task each night, and they’re allowed few flare-ups or failures. It’s a tightrope they walk, and they either become pleasant or inflammatory automatons or they get kicked off the rope.

I’m an anomaly myself now.

We are living in a K-shaped economy that is getting all the more extreme. Oracle just laid off 30,000 workers. What happens when the winners are vastly outnumbered by the losers, but the losers are invisible?

Studies have shown that being successful is less fun in a highly unequal environment. Even if you’re at the top, you’d prefer that it gets spread around a little more. More people have to have a chance to win.

Did you know reading books lengthens your life expectancy? You can pick up a copy of my new book “Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks?” here with the code “UBIUBI” for 25% off or wherever books are sold. Go to noblemobile.com/yang for 3 months off your wireless bill, the best deal around. Hudson Valley Ideas Fest is on April 25th. Look up and give someone a chance.

Last Thursday, a Los Angeles jury ruled that Meta and YouTube were negligent for designing addictive features such as infinite scrolling, autoplaying videos, and beauty filters that contributed to a then-teenage girl’s mental health struggles. The jury determined that Meta was 70% responsible and YouTube was 30% responsible, and awarded her a total of $6 million in damages.

The ruling came shortly after a New Mexico jury found Meta liable for $375 million in damages after the state Atty. Gen. Raúl Torrez alleged that the platform’s features enabled predators and pedophiles to exploit children. A former Meta executive said that, in their experience, 1 in 8 underage Instagram users received unwelcome outreach or harassment through the platform.

Immediately, politicians emerged on cable news programs saying that social media companies need to be reined in. “These verdicts mark an unsurprising breaking point. Negative sentiment toward social media has been building for years, and now it’s finally boiled over,” said one market analyst.

Meta’s stock went down 7% and Google was down 2% on Thursday on a down day for the market generally. Both companies suggested that they were going to appeal the verdicts.

A legal genie has now gotten out of the bottle. Millions of families have been adversely affected by social media platforms over the past number of years, and juries have now upheld that the companies should bear some responsibility. You can easily see lawsuits coming out of the woodwork in every state, and more attorneys general are going to want to burnish their credentials by getting a pound of flesh.

The tech companies are quickly becoming deeply unpopular; if you were a juror and you had a bajillion-dollar tech company on one side and a young woman with an eating disorder or depression on the other, it would be very easy to think “Huh, the money doesn’t mean anything to the company. But it would help the family a lot.” Any public official who holds them to account will seem like a hero too. Meta’s revenue in 2025 was $200 billion and YouTube’s was over $60 billion.

Even as the social media companies are appealing, they’re also advertising their new precautions for teens. I’ve seen the advertisements. You might have too. But the damage has been done, and newly adopted tweaks may only make the legal cases more compelling. Why did they only start making these changes when their feet were held to the fire?

I personally love that this tide has turned. Data was out as early as 2017 that these platforms were terrible for children, teenage girls in particular. Jonathan Haidt’s seminal book, “The Anxious Generation,” has resulted in policy changes in dozens of states. His reaction to these verdicts:

“As of today, we are in a new world: a new era in the fight to protect children from online harms... Big Tech is harming kids on an industrial scale. For years, parents were told these harms were exaggerated, anecdotal, or simply the unavoidable cost of growing up online. Today, a jury affirmed what parents have long known: Meta and YouTube were designed to exploit young people, with devastating consequences... They were negligent and dishonest . . . This is just the beginning. Thousands of cases will follow, bringing Meta, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube to court.”

Lawsuits and new regulations are on tap, and they will materially affect the social media giants. These companies made decisions years ago to maximize engagement and ignore the social and human costs. Those costs are finally coming home to roost, and they will be massive, if far too late for the millions of kids whose lives were changed irrevocably. Our leaders were asleep at the switch, and a generation of kids paid an unthinkable price. For the social media companies, the paying has just gotten started.

Would you believe I started a wireless company to reduce your doomscrolling? Go to noblemobile.com/yang for 3 months off your wireless bill, the best deal around that will also reduce your screen time and help you save for your family. I interview Arthur Brooks on his new book “The Meaning of Your Life Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness“ on the podcast this week. The Hudson Valley Ideas Fest returns to Rosendale, NY on April 25th. Go outside and look up.

During our fifth workout or so, Aaron said to me, “Hey, have you seen some of these personal training apps? Should I be worried that my job is going to disappear?” Aaron was about to propose to his girlfriend and had money on his mind.

His thinking: ChatGPT will give you a comprehensive 40-minute routine if you take a picture of gym equipment, and an AI bot will yell “You’re fat!” in your ear for next to nothing.

I said to him:

“Look, at the margin, some people might use a virtual personal trainer and a home gym. But your job is going to be among the safest ones for a few reasons.

First, you’re in a job where some people are going to value the human touch. Having a real live trainer pushing you and stretching you is tough to replace.

Second, you do this job in Manhattan. This is one of the wealthiest places in the country. Your clientele is what’s called cost-insensitive. They’ll pay a premium and not think too hard about it.

Third, your clients are on the older side. These are among the folks who also would prefer to have a person as opposed to a bot over a screen.”

“Okay, that makes me feel better. Thanks!” Aaron said. Even better, his girlfriend said yes to his proposal a few weeks later and is now his fiancee.

Around the same time, I was doing a call-in show on NPR and a sixth-grade teacher called asking whether her job is safe. I responded, “Yes. We are going to need a teacher to be with our kids for a long time to come, and your school principal or supervisor doesn’t think replacing you with AI is a good idea. Also, AI wouldn’t be able to keep your sixth-graders from walking out the door if they felt like it.”

Teaching jobs are going to be reduced because of city and state budgets being under pressure and lower enrollments as people have fewer kids, but we’re talking about something gradual and an erosion of job security, not wholesale replacement due to AI.

Every day, I get people asking me whether their job is safe or not. The truth is, it’s complicated. Millions of people are going to be employed for years to come. But 44% of American jobs are either manual repetitive or cognitive repetitive and many of them are going to disappear. AI is to office parks what machines were to factories in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

A bunch of firms have come out with ratings and reports of how replaceable a job is by AI given the nature of the tasks involved. Here’s one from Microsoft, for example. But these ratings focus on the nature of the work and not other aspects of organizations, such as whether they are publicly traded and under immense scrutiny to optimize. If you work at a small, sleepy foundation, for example, they might not automate your job because they are just kind of chill or old-fashioned and you’re nice.

How do you know where you are? Here are a bunch of risk factors that your job might be automated away in the next little while:

Factors that Suggest Your Job Might Get Automated

Do you work in tech?

Are you a coder?

Do you make six figures?

Do you work for a publicly traded company?

Are you in a big department?

Does your job involve looking at a computer all day?

Do you work in customer service?

Do the words ‘analyst’ or ‘research’ show up in your job title?

How about ‘designer?’

Are you an interpreter or translator?

Would it be accurate to call you ‘an administrator?’

Do you work in finance, not as a rainmaker?

Do you work in law or consulting, not as a rainmaker?

Do you work in media or content production?

Are you being urged to finish up a particular project and/or monitor your decisions and activities?

Does your project not touch company revenue?

Is your supervisor not making eye contact with you as much?

Are you over the age of 48?

Are you a journalist?

Could you easily imagine a bot doing 80% of your job or more?

If you answered ‘Yes’ to one or more of these questions and you’re not in charge, I’d say you should start making contingency plans, saving some money, reaching out to professional contacts, and generally not be too confident that your present situation will stretch out over a period of multiple years.

Personal note: as a serial entrepreneur, I assume that whatever money I make will be the last I ever make unless I go do something else. Everything is eat what you kill. What a joyous approach to the world. I also eat with my back to the wall and send my kids out into the woods at random.

On the flip side, here are some factors that suggest your job may be resilient for the time being. Hooray!

Things that Might Make Your Job Safe(r for the Time Being)

Do you work for the government or a university? (Less institutional pressure to automate)

Are you in a union? (Require collective bargaining and have some protection)

Do you deal with people all day?

Do you deal with children all day?

Do you deal with sick people?

Do you work with your hands?

Do you repair things?

Do you get dirty?

Do you make house calls?

Do you deal with animals?

Do you touch another human being as part of your job (and it’s okay)?

Does your job involve going outside?

Are you between the ages of 30 and 45?

Do you work for a charity or philanthropic organization (that isn’t running out of money)?

Do you get paid less than $55,000 a year?

Do you serve the top 20% or so of consumers (i.e., rich people pay you)?

Do you have a lot of people who pay you a little bit for something?

Is your job something that people can’t do without?

Do you know something that can be used against the decision-maker such that they kind of want to keep you around?

Are you the person in your organization that other people ask about AI?

If you answered ‘Yes’ to one or more of these questions, congratulations! Your job will likely not be eliminated in the current round of AI-driven automation. People tell me that the robots are coming next, but that won’t be for… at least 12 months.

This is obviously a mildly tongue-in-cheek quiz - the truth is that the ground is shaky even in traditionally safe environments nowadays, as even if you work for a non-profit or the government, budgets are under strain. The big growth area has been health care, but a lot of that money is from state and federal budgets and it can’t go up forever. Someone has to pay for the health care after all.

So… what can you go into that you know has a future?

I’m reluctant to say this because it’s not for everyone, but try to own something. Be the person deciding where the resources go. I ran into an OG Yang Gang supporter at my book talk in Connecticut who said, “I joined my family’s contractor business, and it’s going great.” I could tell he was happy because he was an owner.

The best way to keep the boss from automating your job is to become a boss, because then the only person who can fire you is yourself.

I know, I wish I had better news. I’ll write more on other practical steps for people to take soon.

I started Noble Mobile mainly because it’s a way to save the average American family over a thousand dollars a year. I was spending $150 a month on Verizon and now I’m down to $49, and that’s just for me. Go to noblemobile.com/yang for 3 months off your wireless bill, the best deal around that will help you save for your family and look up. Email matt@noblemobile.com if you want the human touch. The Hudson Valley Ideas Fest returns to Rosendale, NY on April 25^th. Spring is arriving.

“So what do we do?”

I answered, “We generally tax things we want less of. In this situation, we want to preserve labor in every corner and environment. So we should stop taxing labor and instead take the advice of Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, and start taxing AI.” This could be used to fund Universal Basic Income among other measures.

Dario Amodei, in the past number of weeks, has been saying two things: First, his company, which produces Claude, is going to automate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs in the next several years. Second, he thinks his company should be taxed on it. He suggests a 3% of revenue ‘token tax,’ which could raise billions very quickly.

That’s right, one of the biggest AI CEOs thinks we should tax his company.

Why don’t legislators take him up on this suggestion?

Right now, lawmakers lack any real vision for how to deal with AI except to cheerlead and pave the way for data centers. The AI lobby has compiled $185 million, which makes them a feared industry to get on the wrong side of.

Meanwhile, the favorability rate of AI among Americans is only 26%. This is lower than, for example, the rating for ICE.

The argument I made on CNBC is that a popular backlash is coming and some kind of sensible taxing of AI is going to be necessary. The argument that “we can’t interfere with the AI industry for fear of losing the competition to China” ignores the facts that 1. This competition won’t be won on the last dollar spent, but on the models’ abilities to improve themselves and whether there’s a real moat and 2. Chinese and American AI are already separating into two ecosystems and spheres of influence.

My comments on CNBC went viral, in part because of both the logic and the appeal. Who would be mad at taxing AI instead of people, especially when at least one of the companies is literally asking for it? It would make both workers and employers happy and put more money into people’s hands. It would also help preserve millions of jobs in a time when that should be the top priority. Whether our putative leaders can understand this vision and make it happen is one of the big questions; it may be that someone has to force their hand.

Go to noblemobile.com/yang for 3 months off your wireless bill, the best deal around, that will also reduce your screen time and help you save for your family. The Hudson Valley Ideas Fest returns to Rosendale, NY on April 25^th! Go outside and look up.

I heard this from Matt Mahan a couple of years ago after he became mayor of San Jose in 2023. He was young, impressive, and purely solutions-oriented. But he also understood the human side of government. He had been a schoolteacher in the classroom and had young kids at home. “The goal of government should be to help people succeed and live the kind of lives they want.” Pretty simple, straightforward mission statement.

Now, Matt is running for governor of California. “The spending of the government of California has gone up 60% in the past 5 years, to over $340 billion today. Has California gotten 60% better in that time? No one thinks it has.” Indeed, California today is experiencing net population outflows primarily because it’s gotten too expensive to live and raise a family. “I’m running for governor because I think I can make the government deliver more value for the people than we are currently getting.”

One example Matt cited to me in my interview of him for the podcast this week: “When I took office in San Jose, we had a homelessness program run by an organization that employed 40 outreach workers. They were averaging only 1 referral per month per worker. Now, it wasn’t entirely their fault, as we also didn’t have enough beds. But we shifted the resources to beds, and now we have only 10 outreach workers but they’re much more productive because they actually have resources to offer a person on the street.” Very common sense, but imagine that kind of recalibration across a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars. Matt worked in the private sector after his stint as a teacher so he understands how to effectively use resources. The potential benefit for the state and its people is enormous.

His campaign slogan is “Back to Basics.” A lot of our politics has devolved into arguing about this priority or that. Matt’s approach is to get the machine of government actually delivering what it’s supposed to. What a straightforward, yet critical, mission.

The governor’s race in California is a non-partisan affair; the all-party primary is on June 2^nd with the top two vote-getters proceeding to the general election in November. If Matt gets over 20% of the vote in June he will probably go to the general election, where I think he would be very tough to beat.

As you can tell, I’m enthused about Matt’s campaign as I think it has enormous potential to improve the lives of tens of millions of Californians. For my interview of Matt, click here. To check out his campaign, including to donate (as I have), click here. I’m glad someone like Matt decided to make this kind of case in such an important race. He’s got the track record to demonstrate what kind of governor he’d be. And if enough people see his message, I have no doubt that he’ll be in Sacramento next year delivering massive wins for the people.

You know something we can all do better on? Our data. Go to noblemobile.com/yang for 3 months off your wireless bill, the best deal around, that will also reduce your screen time and help you save for your family. Go outside and look up.

What were the takeaways of the “Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks?” tour?

For one, I was generally surprised by the number of completely new faces. I kind of expected it to be a reunion tour, but it wasn’t. At each event, there were a few people who would say, “I finally get to meet you!” These were people who supported me back in 2020, but had never gotten a chance to say hello. One of them was abroad for several years, for example. So that was nice.

Some people came by who had already read the book and enjoyed it. That felt good.

I got a lot of questions about AI. It’s on everyone’s mind, rightfully so. I debated the topic, “Will AI make work obsolete?” for Open to Debate in Washington D.C. last week while on tour. I took the affirmative side. The recording will be out this weekend. I thought my side won.

As if on cue, Block on Thursday announced that they were laying off 4,000 of their 10,000 workers, the highest percentage of layoffs in the history of the Fortune 500. Jack Dorsey explicitly attributed it to AI and building smarter. Their stock jumped 20% immediately. Expect other companies to follow suit in the days ahead. The Fuckening is on and picking up steam.

Attendees were out on the two-party system and eager for an alternative. I made a stop in Richmond for a speaking event about the American political system that drew several thousand people. No one thinks the status quo is working. One person said, “I didn’t know what to expect. But you’ve made me hopeful again.”

The mood out there is generally not awesome and looking for something.

Some old friends came to one stop on the book tour who I hadn’t seen in 20 years. Have you had that experience lately? Maybe if you went to a high school or college reunion. They looked good, but also like… 20 years had passed. You know what I mean? My life has been remarkably constant for the past 20 years, which is coincidentally when Evelyn and I met.

Many people wanted me to run for President again. Obviously, this is among an incredibly self-selected group, but it was heartwarming. Apparently, my platform that AI was coming and we should give everyone money has aged well.

The tour definitely had a campaign-type vibe. I had a wonderful time on the road, and the book has been a welcome reason to get people together. We got requests for a lot of other stops, so stay tuned. And thanks again for coming out if you did! I feel terrible for families as we are about to shed hundreds of thousands of jobs as corporations follow Block’s lead. It’s either cut workers or your job will be on the chopping block soon, and we all know which one CEOs will choose.

You can pick up a copy of my new book “Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks?” here with the code “UBIUBI” for 25% off or wherever books are sold. Go to noblemobile.com/yang for 3 months off your wireless bill, the best deal around that will also reduce your screen-time and help you save for your family. Go outside and look up.

The response has been all over the map. Democrats focused on the lack of Congressional approval and the absence of a plan. Many people from every party called up Trump’s 2024 campaign language of avoiding costly new wars while the American people have other concerns. There was some evidence that Iran was exerting itself to try to agree to American conditions before the strikes began.

I’ll confess to having a range of reactions myself.

The Khamanei regime brutally killed tens of thousands of its own citizens in the last several months in response to widspread protests. I wrote recently that I hoped that America did everything in its power to topple the regime, which has been the source of myriad terrible actions for decades, including plotting the killing of dissidents that lived in America, one of whom I interviewed.

The protests in Iran were fueled by inflation and impoverishment; the currency lost 80% of its value this year alone and water rationing and power outages are the norm. The regime also savagely oppresses girls and women. Internationally, Iran sponsored terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

“There’s no world in which we’re better off with Khamanei in it,” is the way analyst Ian Bremmer put it. I agree. Iran’s nuclear aspirations are a thing of the past. That is also great news for the world.

“Take over your government,” Trump is now urging the people of Iran. “It will be yours to take.” This is going to be very difficult. The people of Iran are essentially unarmed. Tens of thousands of protesters, some of whom would have been potential leaders, have already been killed. There remains a well-developed underground network of Iranians who despise the current government and have been fueling the resistance; this network has managed to maintain communication even while evading constant surveillance. But the remaining leaders of the Islamic Republic will have their own survival at stake and are experienced now at suppressing internal efforts to oust them.

There is also Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah who was removed back in 1979. Reza doesn’t have a ton of relationships within Iran given that he hasn’t been there for decades, but he will be the face of the dissidents abroad who are desperate to move on from the Islamic Republic.

Still, one Iranian who is celebrating Khamanei’s death said, “We have felt entirely alone. Now we know that we are not.”

This military action has been an enormous gamble, and some of the costs are already real. Hundreds of innocent civilians and at least 3 U.S. soldiers have died in the conflict. Iran’s retaliation has included attacks in the region on completely unaffiliated actors in addition to U.S. and Israeli bases.

The major questions lie ahead: How long will the strikes continue? Does the conflict spread? Who will become the new leader of the Islamic Republic, and what stance will they take? What is the follow through? Early signs are that new Iranian leadership has already reached out to Trump and wants to negotiate a cessation of conflict even while signaling escalation in the region. The likely scenario is that Khamanei gets replaced by someone within the Islamic Republic senior ranks who is younger and of similar bent. One Iranian compared the current regime to a hydra; if you cut off one head another like it will appear.

Whether the strikes result in something more positive remains to be seen. But an evil dictator who led the killing and starvation of his own people and sponsored terrorist organizations is dead. The Iranian people have at least some chance for a better way of life, one that didn’t exist before. Some hope is better than none.

“It was her dream school,” she explained. “It’s also where both her Dad and I went. And she’s our only child. It seemed wrong to deny her something that we both had. Plus, she wants to work in the arts so going to the right school seemed important.”

I met their daughter and she seems very happy and successful and is indeed working in the arts. So on that level, it’s tough to argue with her parents’ decision. On the other hand, I found myself thinking that owning that home could come in very handy if they or their daughter run into a rough patch.

“You’d do the same thing for your kids, I bet,” my friend continued, being a bit overly generous in her estimation of my character. I responded, “My parents mortgaged the house to send me to college,” which was true, “so I suppose I would do the same for my kids.” The problem wasn’t my love for my kids, but I just am not the kind of believer in a college education being the end-all-be-all as my parents were in the late 80s and early 90s.

I wrote last week:

School loans will become all the more burdensome without the ability to get a high-paying job. Many young people will be faced with getting a job that doesn’t require a degree while paying for the one that they got at great expense.

Basically, the education premium is going to be sharply reduced with AI’s arrival; many degrees will become devalued. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of marginal colleges are going to close over a number of years. The ones that remain will be asked to prove their value in various ways, with the elite doing fine and the others struggling or evolving.

If you’re weighing going back to school or sending your child in this direction, question the cost of the degree heavily, as the cost-benefit is changing – for the worse – in real time. If it’s low-cost, vocational or top-tier, you’re fine. If it’s expensive and doesn’t lead to a concrete opportunity… maybe re-examine it.

Ten years ago, if an individual asked me whether it was worth it to take out loans to attend a more prestigious school, I probably would have said “Yes” because the return on investment would likely be positive for that person. The gap between the professional and personal advantages of attending, say, a top 30 school versus a less selective school would probably be greater than the additional expense, even if that was significant (e.g. $100,000+).

Today, I might not say that. The debt load today would be more daunting and the advantage to having a fancy degree may be lower. The kid with the costly degree might be just as unemployed as the person from the cheaper state school, plus they might owe six figures or more. It might be better for them to make the most of a less expensive education and grow from there.

AI is going to blast away many – perhaps most – of the entry-level jobs that a new college grad was going to occupy. A professor at a national university told me, “For the first time I have alums, Computer Science grads, calling me saying they’re still without a job, and they’re driving an Uber to make ends meet.” I meet young people who describe that kind of situation all the time.

Americans are losing confidence. 63% of Americans now feel that college is ‘not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off,’ up from 47% in 2017 and 40% in 2013. Their feelings are borne out by recent stats. According to Fortune, only 12% of current college seniors secure a full-time job by graduation, versus 40% for earlier generations. Americans with college degrees now make up a record 25% of all unemployed. Men with college degrees are unemployed around the same rate as men without degrees. 52% of recent grads are doing jobs that don’t require a degree. The college premium is evaporating.

Weaker colleges won’t exist 10 years from now. I know of one – King’s College – that went out of business in New York City in 2025. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia predicts dozens of closures as soon as 2029. The most vulnerable schools are small regional, non-selective colleges with low endowments and/or high debt. A huge red flag is any significant drop in enrollment, which often precedes a drop in viability, or selling of assets to meet a budgetary shortfall.

Yes, we are at the point in American life where it’s a good idea to examine the financial strength of any college you look at to make sure it will still be here 10 years from now.

For many families, it’s not no college vs. college, but more a public university (cheaper) vs. a private university (more expensive, unless you get aid). Another choice might be to get some credits at an inexpensive community college and then try to transfer in your sophomore or junior year.

That said, if employers decide to hire, they’re going to try to take from the top. A Wall St. Journal article last month outlined that McKinsey, a top consulting firm, has shifted its recruitment from dozens of universities to only 20 core schools such as the Ivies, Vanderbilt and Notre Dame. Similarly, GE Appliances has shifted from 45 schools to 15 select universities. Employers are going narrow in their recruitment.

All of this makes sense; if you’re going to hire fewer people and you expect young people to be itching for an offer, you’d probably try to cherry pick.

I hire people, even now. I interview folks who want to join Noble Mobile, for example, some of them right out of college. What do I look for? A spark of some kind. People with energy and commitment. Being good at something and excited about it, whether it’s drama or sports or contributing to an organization.

Cognitive qualities and an academic record may become less important in the AI age relative to other qualities like demonstrated grit, social skills or work experience (or, unfortunately, personal connections). Employers might want to hire people who are consistently delightful or tough, which doesn’t necessarily map to SAT scores. So being a high-performing athlete, a talented singer / dancer / actor, or the head of student government could be more important than how smart you are. A particularly dark example: drug companies used to hire college cheerleaders to head to doctors’ offices because the doctor would be much more likely to talk to them.

One thing I personally think will be a competitive advantage for college students - reading books for pleasure. It will be such a rarity that being highly literate will set you apart. Most businesses still run on emails and words – anyone capable of writing coherently and clearly will be hireable, if they can demonstrate this capacity. Being able to write means you can think. This will be a mild bias among employers of a certain vintage (e.g. folks like me).

Another major finding: employers will try to recruit from campuses physically near them. Think about it if you’re the employer - would you recruit from your local school? Sure, because it’s convenient and inexpensive to do so, it buys you goodwill with your community, and the new hire already has ties to the region and is more likely to stay long-term. So if your child has a hankering for a particular region or industry, going to school in that city or region makes sense.

The Wall St. Journal summarized it like this: “The ‘talent is everywhere’ mantra adopted by U.S. employers when the job market was white hot is giving way to a more traditional entry-level recruiting strategy: hire from a few select universities.” So the upside of going to one of the top schools is going to be higher relative to other more anonymous schools. In a land of diminished opportunities for knowledge workers, it might be more vital than ever to have a personal network from an elite school in order to get an appealing job.

You can think of colleges as more of a barbell, where the top makes sense, and maybe the bottom too if it’s inexpensive, but the full-priced middle is increasingly tougher to defend.

By the way, the math here may miss the point of college for a lot of people. Numerous studies show that college graduates are happier and more optimistic than those who did not attend college. Some of this can be explained by income effects, but some of it is independent of the money. College functions as a maturation environment that is social as much as it is intellectual or academic.

When I look back on my college years, you know what my strongest memory is? Falling in love with my college girlfriend, and then having to get over her because she left me for another guy. Having my girlfriend go from my best friend who I saw every day to a stranger hanging out with another guy rocked my world. I was morose for months. I got into a car accident. I had trouble getting out of bed. I dragged myself to the gym each day as a way to say, “Well, at least I did something today.”

What did I learn in college? How to deal with a breakup. Kind of an important life skill.

Now, I also took a bunch of courses and got an Economics degree. Labor Economics was my favorite course. Professor Cheit helped explain public policy to me. So I did some learning in the classroom too. But college was a place you could go from a quasi-kid to something of an adult with a blend of both freedom and modest responsibility. It’s a social crucible of group projects and failed advances and student organizations and Tae Kwon Do clubs.

College and universities are going to be beset with challenges moving forward, and many are going to struggle to fill seats as AI takes away the presumption of employment for new grads. If a family is of limited means, the debt is going to be very real while the benefits might be tough to identify.

Are my kids going to college? Almost certainly yes, unless one of them becomes a savant entrepreneur or a complete shut-in. They’re studious kids whose parents both have advanced degrees and we can afford it. I’m still Asian, after all. The benefits to college are much more multi-faceted than what your first job looks like or even your earnings over the next decade-plus. Education, college or no, should be about the formation of personhood as much as it is your job skills. Your best teachers taught you to care about something as much as to know something.

The point is, it’s going to be a rougher tradeoff economically. A generation ago, sacrificing a ton of resources to get a child through college or to the best school possible was a solid ticket to a middle-class career and maybe even more. Today, that’s a shakier proposition. Families are going to be grappling with what to tell their kids and whether they should try to push them in a different direction.

I would certainly encourage more people to pursue trades that will be less likely to be overtaken by AI. Think jobs that involve working with kids, sick people, being outside a lot, being an electrician, HVAC repairperson, nursing, that sort of role. We are short hundreds of thousands of tradespeople and these jobs will be more resilient. Vocational schools, trade schools and apprenticeships should be made available to many more young people and prized as smart decisions.

But on a personal level, I get it if young people want to do what Mom and Dad did, even if the time they’re growing up in is going to be very different, and harsher by the numbers. The promise of an education leading to an awesome career is fading as AI soaks up the thinking, while the debt will remain.

Some takeaways:

1) People will still be going to college for the foreseeable future.

2) If you get into a top school, it’s probably still worth it.

3) Recruiters will start to cherry pick and aim for the top.

4) Weak schools will die. Definitely don’t attend one. Many colleges will struggle.

5) If it’s an unremarkable or not-so-great school AND expensive, you might want to rethink it or find a way to cut the costs (for example, by attending an inexpensive school for a year or two).

6) A school being physically near an industry or company you are excited about should be considered as a plus factor.

7) Personal qualities – and ways to demonstrate them – will grow in importance for employers.

8) Networks will still matter. Indeed, they might matter more.

9) There are non-economic reasons to go to schools that revolve around identity and social development. It’s okay to accept that.

10) The promise of a career in knowledge work may or may not be there for this generation, but the debt will be real.

I’ll be on the book tour in LA, SF, and Seattle this week - check dates here. Offline is coming back to SF this week. To start saving money on your data, check out noblemobile.com/yang for 3 free months off your wireless bill. Look up.

Last week, I wrote about how AI is now replacing white-collar workers in earnest as Claude’s Co-work released plug-ins for legal, financial and marketing functions. Social media is filled with accounts from long-time software developers declaring themselves obsolete based on AI’s capabilities right now. Physicists report the same.

Someone in my family had AI program a website for them this week. It completed in minutes what used to take a designer or a firm days of work.

How many roles essentially consist of processing information and then presenting it to someone to make a decision? Now not only the process and report will be automated, but perhaps the decision as well.

This will result in the great disemboweling of white-collar jobs.

This automation wave will kick millions of white-collar workers to the curb in the next 12 - 18 months. As one company starts to streamline, all of their competitors will follow suit. It will become a competition because the stock market will reward you if you cut headcount and punish you if you don’t. As one investor put it, “Sell anything that consists of people sitting at a desk looking at a computer.”

I’ve started to call this displacement wave the Fuckening because that feels more visceral.

Do you sit at a desk and look at a computer much of the day? Take this very seriously.

I want to forecast a few of the immediate social impacts of the Fuckening:

1. Mid-career office workers will be fired in droves. Right now, there are about 70 million white-collar workers in the United States. Expect that number to be reduced substantially, by 20 – 50% in the next several years. Even a reduction of several million would be tectonic, and I fully expect it to go well beyond that level. Major firms are firing people right now. I spoke to the CEO of a publicly traded tech company. He said, “We’re firing 15% of workers right now. We’ll probably do another 20% 2 years from now. And then another 20% 2 years later. After that, who knows?”

Millions of workers are about to be given their pink slips.

The most vulnerable are middle managers who have become more expensive. What will they do next? They’ll look for another job. Good luck with that as job search times have already been climbing and corporations are going to be loathe to hire. Many will find something part-time to pass the time. One friend of mine who lost his job began volunteering with a local non-profit that now might want to pay him to manage their IT infrastructure. The pay would be 80% less than what he used to make, but he might wind up taking it. There will be a ton of similar downgrades ahead.

Expect the Starbucks in your local suburb to become occupied with middle-aged former office workers who want to get out of the house. That’s a benign portrait, but a lot of these families still owe mortgages on their houses that they won’t be able to maintain. If I were a homeowner in Silicon Valley or Westchester County, I might consider putting my house up for sale to see what I could get because there’s going to be downward pressure on these communities. It might not feel great being first, but you don’t want to be last.

It won’t just be the managers. It will be the call-center workers, the marketers, the coders, the financial forecasting teams, and on and on; business functions are going to get compressed into a handful of key employees supplemented by AI.

In essence, the number of people necessary to make large corporations function is going to be dramatically reduced. What do you say if your child asks you about becoming a newspaper journalist? You say, “Well, that field hasn’t really been growing, you might want to consider something else.”

Substitute “programmer/designer/accountant/lawyer/finance/marketing/consulting/analyst/researcher/anything-that-involves-looking-at-a-computer-and-going-to-an-office” and you’ve got the right idea.

Basically, brainpower is now a commodity that is going cheap.

If you are one of the professionals who is likely to be affected, I’m sorry. But this is real. Cut your expenses and take precautionary measures, because there will be many people losing their jobs and you could easily be one of them. This has left the lab and is now at a desk beside you. Only it doesn’t even need a desk – too expensive.

2. Personal bankruptcies will surge. Americans are in general already on unsteady ground financially, but that’s going to get much much worse. Millions of Americans of every walk of life are about to see their way of life threatened. If you lose your job, you typically can get by for a little while on savings, but then it gets rocky pretty quickly. Here, you can see mortgage delinquency rates are already on the rise.

Even if you’re not an office worker, you may be affected. Let’s say you’re a drycleaner or a dog walker or a hairstylist. If people in your community stop going to the office, your business is going to suffer because there are fewer business shirts to launder, people will walk their dogs themselves and cut back on trips to the salon, etc.

The amount of money getting paid to human labor is about to go down. The value is going to get soaked up into the cloud. The K-shaped economy, where the rich enjoy the growth and keep spending while the bottom 80% or so are trying to tread water will become all the more dramatic.

People and families are going to be left behind in large numbers.

Of course, where financial ills and stresses increase, social ills follow in terms of broken relationships, addictive behavior and despair.

I’m sorry I don’t have better news here. But it’s going to get very rough out there for a lot of people. Make a plan. Be adaptable.

3. College grads won’t be able to find jobs. Already, the proportion of seniors who find a job in their field has dropped to 30% and underemployment of recent grads is up to 52%. Enterprises that used to need an annual flow of whippersnappers are now firing some of last year’s whippersnappers. A ton of people will be moving home with Mom and Dad or trying to hide out in graduate school.

School loans will become all the more burdensome without the ability to get a high-paying job. Many young people will be faced with getting a job that doesn’t require a degree while paying for the one that they got at great expense.

Basically, the education premium is going to be sharply reduced with AI’s arrival; many degrees will become devalued. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of marginal colleges are going to close over a number of years. The ones that remain will be asked to prove their value in various ways, with the elite doing fine and the others struggling or evolving.

If you’re weighing going back to school or sending your child in this direction, question the cost of the degree heavily, as the cost-benefit is changing – for the worse – in real time. If it’s low-cost, vocational or top-tier, you’re fine. If it’s expensive and doesn’t lead to a concrete opportunity . . . maybe re-examine it.

4. Downtowns and office parks will empty out. What to do with all of this office space? Many commercial districts struggled through COVID and work-from-home. This will get considerably worse. Commercial buildings are generally very difficult to convert to some other purpose (i.e. residential) because of the floor plans, plumbing and the like.

This will become an overhang in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities with significant office districts. Not that long ago, these offices were a source of significant tax revenue. Their devaluation will hurt municipal balance sheets for years and make cities less able to provide services in other neighborhoods. Washington D.C. should be on the list too but mass layoffs in agencies are more of a political choice and most of those workers are unionized. Major urban centers will become less central and vital with AI, and empty office blocks will become the norm. Think urban wasteland and eerie downtowns leading to municipal tax hikes and declining services.

5. Pessimism and anger will rise up. I saw a note on social media that said, “Do you really think politicians will let millions lose their jobs? They’ll ban AI first.”

Has this person been paying attention? Go talk to the manufacturing workers or the journalists and see how it worked out. Hundreds of billions of dollars have not been spent on this technology for corporate juggernauts to stop now, and most officials have been cheerleading what they see as progress. The genie is out of the bottle.

But yes, people are going to be pissed.

The social contract of ‘study hard, go to school, get a good job, live a decent life’ is about to be vaporized to smithereens. Upward mobility for most will be a thing of the past.

People are not going to take it well. Particularly educated people who think that they deserve better. That’s an ingredient for revolt.

There’s been a lot of talk this past year about how young people are lurching to the left, the growing popularity of socialism in the Democratic Party, and Zohran Mamdani as emblematic of the next wave of leaders.

Imagine what people are going to think when we all feel like serfs to AI overlords that have soaked up the white-collar work?

Everything that has preceded this will be tame compared to what’s coming in terms of anger, despair and unrest. It won’t be very clear or organized, but people increasingly will feel like they have less to lose.

I argued in The War on Normal People that capitalism has done a lot to bring people out of poverty, but capitalism plus AI will be no one’s idea of a desired result, and that we have to advance the economy to revolve around people. That would start with Universal Basic Income.

I’ll have more to say about this as time goes on and the impact becomes clearer. But I’m deeply saddened. As the guy who jumped up and down for the better part of 3 years saying “AI is coming, it’s going to wipe out millions of jobs!” I know that we could and should be doing much more for the people and families of this country. In the absence of that kind of coming together, we are left with every-person-for-yourself in the face of the greatest technological transformation of our lifetimes.

Expect it to get incredibly, intergenerationally rough out there. Batten down the hatches, and do what you can for yourself and those around you.

- Andrew

I’ll be on the book tour in New Jersey and DC this week and then out West next week - check dates here. Offline is coming to DC this week and SF next week. To start saving money on your data, check out noblemobile.com/yang for 3 free months off your wireless bill. Make good decisions.

On January 30^th, the AI Company Anthropic released open-source plugins for its workplace AI offering - Cowork - for legal, finance, sales and marketing.

There was a freakout of epic proportions. Thomson Reuters plunged a record 15.8%. LegalZoom sank 19.7%. Even the advertising giant WPP shed 15%. The software sector collapsed to the tune of $285 billion of market capitalization evaporating in a single day.

Basically, everyone could see a present-day scenario where AI performs multi-step legal research, financial modeling, and even software development with the push of a button. Thus software as a service companies, even giants like Salesforce and Microsoft, took a dive as their massive franchises could be set to lose a ton of value as companies could perform complicated tasks without the help of expensive software products; why would I need to pay Salesforce a per-desk subscription fee when I could just produce a custom version for my company?

The Super Bowl was replete with AI ads showing companies using AI to devise apps or file a report instantaneously. One of them said, “Take the day off!” from work and let AI do it for you.

A LOT of workers are going to be taking days off from work, but they might find that their desk has been cleaned out by the time they get back.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been saying for months that AI – probably his company’s – will wipe out 50% of entry-level white-collar work in the next 1 to 5 years.

He wasn’t kidding.

Of course, some people came out and tried to make this seem like business-as-usual. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia called the sell-off “irrational.” Some of the stocks rebounded slightly in the days afterward. There are stories out about various companies who have given AI too much responsibility having second thoughts and remorse over firing too many programmers.

What I want everyone to understand is that AI is to knowledge work and corporate offices what robots and machines were to the factory floor. Have you been inside a large corporation? What is everyone doing? A lot of folks are producing internal reports, maintaining a process, or helping various systems talk to each other.

Each of these is going to disappear. The systems will talk to each other, the reports will be instantaneous, and the processes will maintain themselves.

Customer service is another big function. AI is assuming more and more of this, in part because many younger consumers would rather not pick up the phone and talk to a human being and the chatbots are getting better.

As companies get leaner and meaner, they’re going to be jettisoning workers right and left.

Expect it to get very rough out there. I had a meeting with an executive at a Fortune 500 company a number of days ago. They are cutting a management layer and thousands of employees. It hasn’t been publicly announced.

By the way, corporate margins are at or near record highs. Companies will make money; they just might not need as many people to do so.

When the history of this time is written, January 30^th will be one of the signs of what’s to come. Plan accordingly.

I started Noble Mobile in part to help people save money during a very tough economic time. Go to noblemobile.com/yang for 3 months off your wireless bill, the best deal around. It’s been a blast seeing people on the book tour. Book tour dates in New Jersey, DC, LA, SF, and Seattle can be found here. Offline is coming to Miami this week and then D.C. and SF. See you out there! Keep looking up.

The book is now available for pre-sale and I hope you consider buying a copy. Use code “UBIUBI” for 25% off. And I’ll be doing a book tour to New Jersey, Connecticut, DC, LA, SF, and Seattle so come on out and say hello!

Chapter 17 – The Wilderness

When I told friends I was running for President, the most common response was something like, “Of what, your Co-op Board?” People were not encouraging. Maybe they had talked to my Mom.

Perhaps I wasn’t as cool as I’d thought?

One friend said something I appreciated a great deal. “That seems crazy. But I said you were crazy before and you proved me wrong. So I said to myself after that, ‘Okay, whatever Andrew tells you he’s doing, just say yes.’ So this time, I’m in.”

I officially declared my presidential run in February 2018 with an article in the New York Times called, “His 2020 Campaign Message: The Robots are Coming.”

It did not take the world by storm.

I make the same mistake over and over again: I think the next thing is going to be like the last thing.

I thought running for President was going to be something like starting a wholesome entrepreneurship non-profit; you talk to people, make your case, present a vision, and get people on board.

But running for President was much more about me and who I was. I initially wanted to call the campaign “UBI2020,” for Universal Basic Income. But someone said, “That sounds like a urinary tract infection.” “Yang2020” was much better, though that required me to be the frontman and own it.

Try something for me: find a roommate or friend or your spouse, take them by the shoulders and say to them, “I’m running for President of the United States of America.”

It feels ridiculous, right? Like you immediately want to follow it up with, “I’m just kidding! This book asked me to say it to you, it’s not real!”

It felt that way for me too for quite a while. And the reactions didn’t help.

It took me about a year to be able to say it to a stranger with a straight face without any hint of irony or self-deprecation or doubt. For the most part it was incredibly awkward. I would go to my kids’ school events and avoid questions about what I did for a living because saying, “I’m a presidential candidate” made me seem like an absolute lunatic. Imagine some Dad at the potluck telling you that? Plus, if you do decide to tell them, it takes 15 minutes to explain, and at the end they never say, “Let me help! Where do I donate or volunteer?”

Instead, I’d get a confused, “Interesting . . . good luck with that.” Who wants to have that conversation over and over again?

Running for President without the virtues of fame, title, fortune, crowd support, social media following, etc. was a real education in humility. We had events where no one showed up. Who wants to hear from the random guy with delusions of grandeur?

Not many people it turns out.

So how did we get through those early days?

You take it day by day. But we had some things going for us. First, we had a fun, scrappy young team of true believers. Who would sign up for the Yang campaign as a wise career choice? Everyone on staff was driven by the truth of the message. Thanks to Zach in particular.

Second, we had a sense of humor about our situation. We didn’t take ourselves that seriously.

Third, we seized on anything positive and made a big deal out of it. Anytime someone donated to our campaign, even if it was $5, we would ring a bell in our little office. I would then email or call that person to thank them. For a long time, I was thanking friends of mine, who totally deserved it! But sometimes I’d be thanking a stranger, and they seemed surprised and thrilled to hear from me. Pretty soon the newcomers outnumbered the people I knew.

Zach told me to get good at social media, because it was free. I put energy into that. That would eventually help us grow.

We said yes to any interview or event, no matter how small or niche-y. Ask me anything chat on Reddit? Sure! Interview with a tech website? Definitely. And then we thanked them and amplified it even if they were slightly snarky in the coverage.

One question I would get a lot in those early interviews:

“Are you serious? Do you think you can win?”

It’s a bit of a trick question because if you say “Yes,” you’re crazy.

But if you say “No,” you’re a joke.

So you have to come up with a third answer, something like:

“This is a campaign of ideas.” or

“There are multiple versions of victory.”

If there were a few phrases I would use to sum up running for President in those early days, they were “camera angles,” “rental cars,’ and “rest stops.”

Let’s say we had a campaign event in South Carolina. 10 people showed up. If you pile those 10 people into the same picture plus yourself plus maybe a staffer or two, you could make it look like an okay event if . . . you get the right camera angle. With the wrong camera angle, it looks desolate and empty. So a lot of energy was spent arranging people and trying to get the right angle. A dud becomes a quality pic with the caption: “Talking to voters in Columbia, South Carolina – they’re excited about the campaign!”

I spent a ton of time in rental cars. In Iowa and New Hampshire, they are the only ways to get around. At one point, my cameraperson was doubling as my driver. It was late at night in Iowa heading to our hotel, and he almost hit a divider. He was not inspiring confidence, despite being stone cold sober. Trying not to be obnoxious, I asked offhandedly, “Hey, out of curiosity, have you ever been in any car accidents?”

“Yeah, 4, but none of them were my fault.”

I paused. “Great. Can you stop at this next gas station? I could use a bathroom break.” Then, after I came out, I said, “Hey, I feel like driving. Just to relax. Can I take it from here?” There was no way I was going to wake up in a ditch because my cameraperson couldn’t drive.

Because you’re crisscrossing these states so much, the rest stops become havens. A lot of the time, because of your schedule, you’re eating rest stop food as a meal, which isn’t great. I got super excited to head into a rest stop to pick up a meal of mixed nuts, sunflower seeds, a KIND bar and popcorn with some iced tea. My favorite rest stop chain name in Iowa was Kum N Go, which had its name changed in 2023. I wonder why? It pains me that I will never go into a Kum N Go again.

People ask me how I had the perseverance to run. Sometimes I ask entrepreneurs, “If you were to decide to start a business, how much time have you just signed up for?”

They think for a minute. Then they typically answer,

“Five years.”

“Eight years?”

“I don’t know. Because you can’t know.”

“That’s right! That means running for office is easier than starting a business.” I respond. By deciding to run for President, I knew I was signing up for 3 years of campaigning. More likely it was going to be 2-and-a-half years since I probably wouldn’t get past the primaries. “If I told you that you’d have to knock yourself out and do everything right for 2.5 years, could you do it?”

That made it seem more doable.

The moment I told my friends I was running and took a dollar from them, I signed up to do my utmost through the finish line. In the tough early days, I tried to make each day a little better than the one before. I believed in the case I was making because I knew it had the virtue of being true – AI was coming. I had to let people know. I was like Jon Snow except I knew who my parents were.

The book is now available for pre-sale; use code “UBIUBI” for 25% off. Book tour dates in New Jersey, Connecticut, DC, LA, SF, and Seattle can be found here. Go to noblemobile.com/yang for 3 months off your wireless bill, the best deal around. Offline is coming to Miami this week and then D.C. and SF. See you out there!

“Man, I need to reinvent myself,” he shared. “My videos aren’t performing as well as they used to.” He went viral a number of years ago for some humor videos – I sensed that he had been trying to recapture the magic ever since.

I commented to him, “Yeah, same with me, same with me” to be supportive and relatable. I found myself glad – for the millionth time – that I’m not directly reliant upon views, clicks and impressions to pay the rent and feed my family.

Back in 2014, I was the CEO of Venture for America, an entrepreneurship org that I’d founded three years earlier. I wrote my first book – “Smart People Should Build Things” – that year to promote the ideas behind the org. I was paid $55,000, which was a healthy advance for a first-time author. It felt awesome to get paid anything to put pen to paper. My agent said that I should join then Twitter, which I did in December of 2013.

Still, that $55,000 less 15% for my agent’s fees wasn’t exactly life-changing money. It was more of a super-pleasant bonus on top of my non-profit salary.

When Smart People Should Build Things came out, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’m sure just about every author harbors the hope that YOUR book becomes a big deal or bestseller.

It didn’t.

It did fine, but it didn’t set the world on fire.

Most books don’t. Blog posts, either.

I still felt good about it – like I had something I wanted to express and put out into the world. Anytime someone told me they liked my book it felt like gold.

If there’s one major idea that has been animating me for the past 8 – or 25 – years, it’s been that the marketplace doesn’t get a lot of things right.

I left a high-paying corporate job at age 25. I took a big pay cut to try to co-found a business. My bank account took a hit, but the nature of the work I was doing improved.

That company flopped, so I felt like a failure for a while. I learned, and later became CEO of a company that did well. But it’s not like I became a better or smarter person when the market started to value my actions more.

When I was running for President, I put it in stark terms: “My wife Evelyn is at home with our children, one of whom is autistic. What does the marketplace value her work at? Zero. But we all know that’s perverse, that the work she’s doing is among the most important work there is.”

What the market says about what we’re worth will become more dramatically wrong in the AI age. AI is about to expunge millions of jobs. It doesn’t matter if you’re a smart and conscientious call center worker or an Uber driver or a lazy, unmotivated one – AI will replace both in equal fashion. People who studied for years to become an accountant or lawyer will see their training become obsolete in a matter of weeks.

This was the primary theme of “The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income is our Future,” which I wrote in 2018. TWoNP was the basis of my presidential campaign that took me to seven presidential debate stages – thank you! - and the screens of tens of millions. It argues for a human-centered economy that would start by alleviating poverty at scale.

My fear at the time was that, as the market zeroes out the worth of our labor and time, we would turn on each other, fueled by tribalism and polarization. A two-sided political system wouldn’t help.

That seems pretty spot-on.

I set out to improve the situation by starting Forward, which hopes to bring people together and get us beyond the current us vs. them conflict narrative that naturally dehumanizes us. Humanity Forward continues to advocate for various anti-poverty policies here and now. And Noble Mobile is working to reduce people’s screentime and get consumers more money.

The challenge remains: how do we value people intrinsically in a way that’s distinct from the numbers that the market assigns to both us and our time? As I wrote in TWoNP: “We are more than the numbers on our paychecks – and we are going to have to prove it very quickly.”

Did you know that Noble Mobile users use 15 – 20% less screen time AND typically cut their wireless bills by 50%? Go to noblemobile.com/yang for 3 months off your wireless bill, the best deal around. Offlineparty.com is coming to Miami, DC, and SF next. My new book “Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks?” comes out in February and the tour dates are up here starting in New York on Thursday! Use code ‘UBIUBI’ for 25% off the book. Maybe it’ll become a bestseller. Or not. Whatever, it’s cool.

Outrage over the killing of Alex Pretti reached athletes and influencers that ordinarily might try to steer away from politics. Dissections of the video were everywhere on cable news. The NRA said “Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.”

You know it’s bad when you’ve lost the NRA.

ICE killed the wrong human being. Alex Pretti has proven very difficult to caricature or villainize. Millions of Americans saw the video and concluded that he was an upstanding person trying to help another before being unjustly executed.

All of the more principled Republicans started making statements. Bill Cassidy claimed, “The credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake.” David McCormick stated, “We need a full investigation into the tragedy in Minneapolis. We need all the facts.” John Curtis wrote, “I disagree with Secretary Noem’s premature DHS response, which came before all the facts were known and weakened confidence.” Lisa Murkowski said, “The tragedy and chaos the country is witnessing in Minneapolis is shocking . . . a comprehensive, independent investigation of the shooting must be conducted . . . “ This is the crew you look to to see if Trump is losing with moderate Republicans.

Trump has gotten the message. The first official to be scapegoated was Greg Bovino; the Border Patrol chief lost his commander-at-large role and left Minneapolis. Democrats have their sights set on DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who doesn’t have a lot of friends in Washington. What happens to the actual agent who shot Alex Pretti will take some time.

Trump called Tim Walz and Jacob Frey and posted a more conciliatory message on Truth Social. He dispatched Border Czar Tom Homan to run the operation in Minneapolis, presumably to tone down the approach.

He’s going to need to do a lot more than that to calm the anger. Democrats are looking at the end-of-January shutdown as a real opportunity now to extract demands from Republicans who are quickly sinking in the public’s estimation of how they are handling immigration, an issue they had a massive advantage on. There’s also talk of impeaching Kristi Noem.

In my mind, the major flashpoint upcoming is whether Noem keeps her job. Trump will be loathe to show that much weakness by axing his DHS Secretary who has been a dogged messenger. On the other hand, Noem has rubbed various people in the administration the wrong way and is the most visible scapegoat given her reflexive defenses of ICE actions. Of Pretti, she said that he “committed an act of domestic terrorism” and “approached” agents while “brandishing” a 9mm semi-automatic handgun and was carrying “dozens of rounds of ammunition [to] inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.”

Anyone who saw the video knows that all of this is nonsense. We all know who Alex Pretti was – a selfless nurse who died trying to help others. The administration is losing on this one because people will still believe their own eyes.

To turn down the temperature in our country, check out Forward, which is trying to reduce polarization. To reduce your screen time, which can contribute to polarization in our own lives, check out Noble Mobile. Character still matters in the world, and that’s a wonderful thing.