April 17, 2026 • 37 mins
A Molotov cocktail hurled at Sam Altman’s home. Bullets fired at a city councilman who approved the building of a data center. The cultural mood around artificial intelligence has shifted, and this week on Everybody’s Business, we’re trying to make sense of it. Bloomberg tech reporter Sarah Frier joins Max and Stacey to break down what’s driving the new wave of AI backlash, from consumer frustration to outright rage. Then, the job market is rough for everyone, but especially if you're just starting out. Businessweek senior editor Julia Rubin joins the show to talk about what Gen Z is actually up against. Plus, a sneaker company shifts to AI, and a controversial economic term.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Stacey, there's been so much talk here and elsewhere on
Wall Street in the business press about AI, your favorite subject,
saving the world, changing our lives, curing cancer, solving climate.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Change, talking to whales, talking.
Speaker 4 (00:26):
To whales, or your favorite thing.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Almost everyone agrees AI is awesome as far as I
can tell. But there is starting to be quite a
lot of backlash as well, including some very upsetting incidents.
Speaker 5 (00:38):
Yes, there's actually been some violence, including against Open AI
CEO Sam Alman recently. And you're right, it definitely seems
like a lot of the excitement and optimism around AI
has become at least more complicated.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
There may be an erosion in our ability to learn
how to compromise with others, to learn how to collaborate
with others, like people who actually give us pushback, shape
how we feel, teach us things. Yeah, this is all existential.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
We're going to hear about more of that from Bloomberg
reporter Sarah Fryer. We're talking about what these threats and
attempts at harm say about this current moment and the
conversation around AI.
Speaker 5 (01:17):
And after that, Max, we are going to talk about
the job market. It is tough out there, especially for
young job seekers, especially if you just graduated. And Business
Week's latest issue is all about that, what it is
like to be young and just starting out in your career.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
College graduates, recent graduates, we see you.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
And even better, we have BusinessWeek Senior editor Julia Rubin
here to break it all down for us.
Speaker 6 (01:41):
It's very interesting and this idea of Okay, if we
are sort of automating away the grunt work or the
sort of technical work, then perhaps like the work that
is more about.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Being a human is going to be much more important.
Speaker 5 (01:58):
This is everybody's business from Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
I'm Stacy Vannox.
Speaker 5 (02:02):
Smith and I'm Max Chafkin Jobs AI. It is all
happening this week, and it is a lot, but stick
around and Max, we can just all process this together.
Speaker 7 (02:18):
This morning, dramatic new surveillance images of a man authorities
say tried to kill open AI CEO Sam Altman by
throwing a Molotov cocktail at his home. Investigators have charged
twenty year old Daniel Marino Gamma with attempted murder Stacy.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Just a few days ago, as we're talking now, there
was this attempted arson attack on the home of Sam Altman,
the CEO and co founder of Open Ai. And there's
a lot to say about this, and about to say
about the manifesto that this guy wrote, But I think
it also maybe says something about the current sentiment, the
(02:54):
broader sentiment about AI in general.
Speaker 5 (02:57):
Yeah, I think so too. This attack, by the way,
is not the only one. Last week in Indianapolis, a
local councilman who had approved the construction of this big
new data center in the area had bullets fired at
his front door, along with.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
This note that read no data centers.
Speaker 5 (03:12):
It definitely seems like some of the kind of excitement
and optimism around AI has has turned or at least
gotten a little more complicated.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Yeah, and we've got a great person talked about this.
It is Sarah Fryar, Bloomberg Managing editor, a longtime reporter.
She wrote a book all about Facebook and kind of
the last time tech was under the microscope. It's called
No Filter, The Inside Story of Instagram. Sarah, Welcome to
everybody's business.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
All right, So, Sarah, I feel like just a couple
of weeks ago, we were talking about how the ais
were going to be our friends, and they were going
to do all our work and they were going to
usher in a glorious new future. Now we've got these
attacks we mentioned too, there was actually a second attack
on Sam Almon's house. And when you look the poll
(04:00):
numbers about this, there have been a bunch of polls
in and AI is pretty unpopular.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
And I'm wondering what's your read on this.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
It did something change or are people just paying attention
to something that was there the whole time.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Well, I think it's a big change when something goes
from a cool new tool you can play with to
the reason people thinks jobs are going away, the reason
young people can't find careers when they graduate from college
or grad school, the reason the environment is under stressed,
(04:35):
energy prices are high. There are these existential things that
are tied up in the progress of AI. It may
be of help to us for particular tasks or questions
or coding projects and what have you, But the vast
majority of people are not seeing yet the way that
(04:56):
AI is enriching them. Instead, they're seeing the way that
it's taking things away, whether that's employment or resources, or
just the threat that it might one day take something
away and part of that, I think is the company's
own ful the way that they have marketed this technology
as like, really, this is so powerful, we need to
roll this out slowly, take our time, because if we don't,
(05:19):
the results could be disastrous.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
They've literally been saying our technology might end the world.
It might be that sam Altman, including the Samlman, might
be as bad as a nuclear weapon. And also it
very likely will take everyone's.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Jobs, which is why you should buy it from us,
because at least we're saying the truth right it is.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
The matingment is that.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
It is the strangest public relations strategy of all time.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Honesty, it's never a good idea in pr.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
These companies that have that have spoken about the power
and danger and incredible uncontrollableness of AI may actually be
stoking real fear in regular people who think they have
to do something about it. And of course no condonement
of violence, but you don't have to go too far
(06:06):
in the logic to get somebody to that place where
they fear AI and think that they're doing the right
thing by trying to stop it. Obviously that's the wrong
way to do it, but there are people having these
philosophical even religious debates in Silicon Valley right now about
what AI is bringing to change our future and how
(06:29):
much of it we should be embracing. And then there's
the other side of that, which is like, how much
of that is just marketing talk?
Speaker 5 (06:36):
Sarah, I feel like this is such a similar thing
that's happened throughout history, Like back in the eighteen eighties,
there were the Luddites and the saboteurs who threw their
shoes into the machines because they saw those machines as
threatening their jobs. The Luddites would go with tools and
smash the big textile machines apart.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Do you see this as like that or is this different?
Speaker 5 (06:58):
Is this just the human reaction to an existential job
threat from a new technology.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
I think even within the companies there's a lot of
this kind of debate, and Anthropic has made this part
of their brand, the fact that they're thinking all the
time about how do we not just enact AI progress,
but do it in a way that takes into account
everything that could go wrong, Because once we release it
(07:26):
on the world, we may not be able to control it.
So we have to make sure that what we release
is something that is at least understood, and I think
that's almost impossible because there's some level of complexity to
these models where we don't exactly know how they come
to the conclusions that they come to, and they're driving
their conclusions from a lot of different sources. They're building
(07:48):
upon the human knowledge that they've ingested, and they're really
only as good as how they've been trained. But I
think that does get us to an uncomfortable place where
on the one hand, you have people trying to do
whatever they can to build as quickly as they can
and take advantage of the new technology, and then you
(08:08):
have people who are too scared to even touch it.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Can I bring up a few sort of data points
and some polling here I alluded to it at the top.
But in September of twenty twenty five, Pew, the big
survey people, released their latest survey about how people feel
about AI, and the numbers are really stark, and I
think you go back to how people felt about smartphones
(08:34):
or cloud computing or any of these other recent technology developments,
it feels different. So in twenty twenty one, eighteen percent
of people were more excited than concerned about AI, and
thirty seven percent of the people were more concerned than excited.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
So a lot of concern about AI.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Four years later, there's been a lot more AI, a
lot of people have had contact with this technology, and
the numbers have gotten way worse. Fifty percent more concerned
than excited, ten percent more excited than concerned, a huge,
huge majority. And then the by far the biggest thing
in the survey is more concerned.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
And then the second part of this this is.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Showing up of course, in politics, people getting upset about
data centers in their backyard, Bernie Sanders saying, we need
to have a pause on data centers. But the thing
that really grabbed me in the survey was not the
top line. But then they went and asked people, Okay,
what are you concerned about, Sarah. You brought up a
bunch of things. You brought up the environment, you brought
(09:35):
up job loss, there was one other. When I heard
about this, I thought, okay, yeah, so people are probably
worried about it's probably economic anxiety, right, They've been hearing
these stories about job loss. It has got to be
the main thing. But you look at this survey. They
asked of the people who are most concerned, the top
problem was not job loss. It was erodes human abilities
and connections that was twenty seven percent eighteen negative impact
(09:58):
on accuracy of information. Next one concerns over human control
of AI, and then job losses all the way at
number five. The fifth most concern, the environment, which you
hear a lot about on the news, is way down there.
It's almost at the very bottom, like two percent. And
then then my favorite is general dislike, which is just
one percent. That's the lowest.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
One's So it's so interesting.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
I they're like spiritual concerns that people have, right, they
are worried about job loss, but they're also worried about
these more fundamental questions.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
It's crazy loneliness, and you have people like Mark Zuckerberg
who are offering up AI as an antidote to loneliness,
while our social media feeds become full of AI slop.
One thing I think that is different about this era
of new tech compared to the past waves is this
(10:48):
is not as clear a game of disrupting the giants
as past eras of new tech have been. Normally, when
when you have this like big powerful new startup, they're
coming in to fight the incumbent. We've just come off
of a couple decades of sour feelings about big tech.
(11:12):
These AI giants don't exist without big tech. They're collaborating,
they're in deep business partnerships, deep financial partnerships.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
They need each other.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
And I think that means that a lot of the
sentiment and distrust that people have about Facebook, about Google,
about all these companies that they've just built up an
aversion to over antitrust over their personal data over all
of these things over the past few years, and yet
we keep using them because they're the best options.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
We have.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
A lot of that is trickling over to the AI era,
and people are thinking of these companies sort of in
the same boat. I think, if you're like a young
person today and you're being told you can't be on
social media or it's dangerous to be on social media,
what are you going to do with your time? You're
probably gonna talk to chat EBT. I just think that
(12:07):
as a substitute for human connection, it's going to be
a big enhancement in some ways because it's something that
will always respond, will always be there, will always give
you an answer. But it's but there may be an
erosion in our ability to learn how to compromise with others,
to learn how to collaborate with others, like people who
(12:28):
actually give us pushback shape how we feel, teach us things. Yeah,
this is all existential to.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
Get a little more practical though.
Speaker 5 (12:38):
AI is really, it feels like, in many ways, kind
of holding up our economy right now. Obviously the Magnificent
seven stocks, which are all very deeply invested, if not
making AI, are really carrying the markets, which has been
one of the real bright spots in the economy lately.
I mean, how big a part of our economy is
(12:59):
A Like, even if we're worried about it and there
are all these mixed feelings that are surfacing, do we
need it?
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (13:06):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:06):
The top four tech companies are spending six hundred and
fifty billion dollars on data centers this year. Like, that's insane.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
It's insane.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
It's not insane if you think about what the capacity
needs of AI are, it's just unprecedented. And yeah, that
is fueling the economy, But how much of that money
is trickling down to everyday people who are going to
the grocery store and seeing prices higher than It's just
there's a disconnect right now between the spending and who
(13:36):
is receiving the benefits of having an ai economy, And
I think that's going to show up in the midterms
later this year.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Sarah, before we let you go, I'm just curious. You're
talking to us from San Francisco. Big tech is your beat.
We haven't mentioned the name Luigi Mangioni, but I remember
when the United Health CEO was assassinated, there was a
lot of in talking to sources and stuff. They were afraid,
and I think are still afraid. And I'm curious whether
(14:06):
you're picking up that same level of anxiety, Like are
people aware of the potential for violence, for this kind
of generalized anxiety to spill into something scary.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
I think that there has been a lot of thought
put into executive security in the wake of the United
Healthcare shooting, and even before that. Mark Zuckerberg he has
millions of dollars each year spent on the security of
him and his family. A lot of executives, including Sam Altman,
(14:41):
have spoken of building bunkers at their properties, maybe even
for more than.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Zuckerberg has a bunker on Kawaie.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
I think, yeah, plenty of them have bunkers.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Again, not a great public relations strategy talking about your bunkers, right.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
The logos might not love that, right.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
And I don't know if the bunkers are to protect
from angry citizenry or to protect from the AI apocalypse.
Speaker 4 (15:04):
I'm not quite sure. Sarah Fryar, thanks for being here,
Thanks for.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Having me.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Max.
Speaker 5 (15:17):
One of the things I think we've talked about, maybe
more than almost anything else, is jobs, the job market,
which has been just the source of a lot of
distress and a lot of worry for years now.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah, and it's been especially bad for young job seekers,
for people who are sort of leaving school and trying
to find their first job or their first internship.
Speaker 4 (15:42):
It's tough out there.
Speaker 5 (15:43):
It is tough out there, Yeah, for young job seekers.
The unemployment rate, I think is almost two times what
it is for overall job seekers. And the situation for
overall job seekers isn't great either. And we wanted to
see what it feels like for people who are young
and maybe just starting out in their careers or just
about to enter the job market. And so we sent
(16:04):
our producer Jasmine JT Green out onto the streets of
New York to talk to some young people and ask
them what their job situation is right now.
Speaker 8 (16:14):
I think current job market in the US is really limited,
especially to like international students like me, especially who doesn't
have any like US citizenship or a green card or something.
Speaker 9 (16:26):
That I'm a student, and what I've heard is it's
really difficult to get a job right now, depends what
worlds we're in. But I'm studying biology, hopefully to be
a dentist. And for me, it's been really difficult to
find like internship stuff like that boost my resume and
eventually get a better job.
Speaker 10 (16:41):
For me, trying to get a job in New York City,
like a part time job, it's really hard and I
I've been unemployed for a few months now and it's
hard to get another.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
Part time job. What would you say It's the most
difficult part.
Speaker 9 (16:56):
Having connections in like knowing who to reach out to
to find what you want, because I feel like cold
emailing a lot of the time doesn't really work, So
I feel like having connections that can really get you
a job is definitely the hardest part.
Speaker 8 (17:09):
English is my second language and kind of I think
it's really hard for me to engage like people in
a community.
Speaker 9 (17:16):
And stuff like that.
Speaker 10 (17:17):
I think that there's just a high demand for jobs
and there aren't enough. And also yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
High demand for jobs, and that tells the story.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
You know what's interesting for me to hearing this.
Speaker 5 (17:31):
I feel like, you know, all all the time, there
are things that give you a leg up in the
job market, right if you're looking for a job in
your native language, if you have citizenship in the place
where you're looking for a job, if you have connections,
all these things that are always an advantage in the
job market. I think when the job market gets tight,
it becomes like a really really hard to get a job.
(17:53):
If you don't have those things, I mean, they would
always be a leg up, but all of a sudden,
it's like almost impossible to get a job. If you
don't have like every conceivable advantage, then it becomes impossible.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
We're talking about this, of course, because in the brand
new issue of Bloomberg Business Week, we have a whole
bunch of stories all about first jobs.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
This is an awesome.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Collection of this combination of sort of trend stories and
first person and interviews. It's all about what things look
like right now for young people, what does it mean
for their careers, but also for all of us we
have Julia Rubin. She is a BusinessWeek editor. Our colleague
is here in the studio with us right now. Julia,
(18:33):
Welcome to everybody's business.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 6 (18:35):
I feel this is like a real, you know, longtime listener,
first time caller situation.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
So you know you're from the credit that's right.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Yeah, put together this show, and you also put together
this awesome issue.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Thank you, Yeah, I did.
Speaker 5 (18:48):
I want to start out really broadly, what does the
job market look like for young people right now?
Speaker 3 (18:53):
What are they up against? It's bad, It's not good.
Speaker 6 (18:57):
The unemployment numbers for young people are higher than the
unemployment numbers for the general population. And we are in
a time of overlapping crises right now, and many things
feel really bad, but this in particular is not good.
There are fewer entry level jobs, there are more people
applying to them. Young people being out of work is
really bad for the long term health of the economy.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
And not just young people, but particularly young people with
college degrees.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
That's one of the big and strange and upsetting trends.
I guess, especially if you're one of these people with
a college degree, is that historically your job prospects are
better if you have a college degree, and right now
that is that's not true, right, Julia?
Speaker 6 (19:38):
Yes, and no, Okay, there is an underemployment crisis, which
means that there are more degree hars than degree requiring jobs.
That said, degree requiring jobs are still going to make
you more money. It is still something that is incredibly desirable.
But if you are able to get a job right
(19:58):
now and you are young, it's very possible you're getting
a job that you did not need your two hundred
thousand dollars education for.
Speaker 5 (20:04):
What are some examples of this? Did they talk to
anybody who was unde employed in the issue? Because I
feel like we see numbers for unemployed, and I believe
the unemployment numbers for eighteen to twenty four year olds
is I think it's like over eight percent.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
It's really high. But underemployment the data is a little harder. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (20:22):
I think the most interesting place and the most kind
of salient place to start is like engineers and computer
science grats, because from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty four,
entry level openings for those kinds of roles grew about
six percent. However, graduates of those fields or into those
fields grew by one hundred and ten percent, So there
is this huge mismatch between eighty set.
Speaker 4 (20:43):
So learn to code right now, and they lie.
Speaker 6 (20:45):
And you know what, I didn't learn to code, and look,
we are not recent college grads.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
But there you go. But no, totally.
Speaker 6 (20:51):
And I think this is a field where AI and
theory is starting to have some impact.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
But also there's a lot of AI washing.
Speaker 6 (20:57):
These companies hired too much during the pandemic, and now
they're blaming AI for layoffs when like, that's not really
the reason why yet at least that they are slashing jobs.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Juliet at the beginning of this issue of about first
jobs and early career workers, there's this really staggering chart
that compares essentially the unemployment rate for recent college graduates,
people between the ages of twenty two and twenty seven,
and everybody else. And until looking at it about what
(21:27):
like twenty twenty, for a very long time is fourteen
years or so, fifteen years, the recent college graduates had
a much lower unemployment rate than the rest of us.
And basically, if you were a recent grad, you were
golden compared to the average worker. And it flipped and
that I think maybe gets to the core of a
(21:50):
lot of the kind of anxiety you hear from young workers,
as well as conversations around AI. Is this a crisis
and how bad is it?
Speaker 3 (21:58):
I mean, it's totally complicated. No one knows anything yet.
Speaker 6 (22:01):
There are definitely people saying, okay, AI is going to
you know, wipe out the bottom bottom rung of the
ladder and the entry level jobs, the work that entry
level workers are doing.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
That's the easiest stuff to be automated.
Speaker 6 (22:14):
There are also people who are like, actually, this is
going to create all of these jobs, and it's actually
just going to sort of change the nature of what
these first jobs look like. They'll be way more valuable.
And there is this class of what we're calling AI natives,
though I don't really know if I totally agree with that,
because people who are graduating in the class of twenty
twenty six have had access to these large language models
(22:37):
their entire college career.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
They've been cheating on their college classes fast years.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
How they are ready to be management consultants.
Speaker 6 (22:43):
But your children are actually the AI natives, right, because
it's like, if you're like an elementary school, you are
growing up with the technology in the same way that
we did with the internet, and then like social life,
you did that, I did that. I'm very young. I
don't know if you can sell. But yeah, so it's
there is some level of AI fluency, but there's also dependency.
You're also having these kind of recent grads or sometimes
(23:06):
college students going into these internships and they know how
to use these tools way better than anyone else in
the workplace does, but they know nothing about the subject
matter that they are actually, you.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
Know, using the models for. There's also a lot of
soft skill stuff that they may not know.
Speaker 6 (23:20):
They don't know how to present the slide deck that
is being made for them by the AI.
Speaker 4 (23:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
One of my favorite parts of this issue, there's a
story about management consultants, and the funny thing is it
seems like a lot of the anxiety among the people
who run management consultancies is not about the entry level
employees so much as the idea that AI slop might
be somewhat indistinguishable from the normal output of a management consultancy,
(23:46):
and that is manifesting in that they really want to
make sure that their junior associates whatever they're called, have
soft skills that they don't just sound like they're reciting
points on a PowerPoint created by a chatbot, and that's where.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
We're hearing too. It's oh, like we really want English majors.
Speaker 6 (24:02):
And that's like a cross across the spectrum now, which
is also like a joke, because when we graduated it
was like again, got to be an engineer, got to
be a business major, whatever, And so a lot of that.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
I think is down to me.
Speaker 6 (24:12):
I'm but learn to ode, learn to owde man.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
I didn't even it wasn't even an English major.
Speaker 9 (24:19):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (24:20):
But yeah, it's very interesting and this idea of Okay,
if we are sort of automating away the grunt work
or the sort of technical work, then perhaps like the
work that is more about being a human is going
to be much more important.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
Julia.
Speaker 5 (24:36):
A lot of times young people, especially in difficult job markets,
get the short end of the stick.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
So a lot of times.
Speaker 5 (24:43):
You will see unemployment much higher for younger people than
it is.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
For the rest of the workforce.
Speaker 5 (24:51):
Do you see this moment as different from previous downturns
in that way? Is this moment harder on young workers
than like the housing crisis, the financial crash were, or
is this sort of the same.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
Young workers are always going to be the first impacted.
Speaker 6 (25:07):
It's like when there is like a soft job market,
like that is who is going to have the most trouble.
But what's interesting is unemployment is way higher during two
thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, twenty ten when
I graduated, but the overall unemployment was higher than for
recent grads and that is flipped now, And I think
that is something that is like really interesting and like
really concerning because people are not able to enter the
(25:29):
market and then they're not able to build their careers.
There's also this like horrible research that is not being
able to get a first job is going to impact
your I think it's like your salary for the first
ten years. Also, higher rates of divorce, You're going to
have fewer kids, There's like worse health outcomes, there's higher mortality.
It's really bad when unemployment for young people is up
(25:51):
above the general population.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
One thing I've wondered about at part this conversation has
made me sometimes a little bit on comfortable because so
much of it seems to be about class and about
the expectation that going to college will vault you above
people who don't go to college, and the fact that
that is breaking down feels like a violation of some
(26:17):
sort of social contract in the reporting for this, for
these stories, are you picking up anything like that any
young people being like, no, they should have not learned
a code. But maybe I shouldn't have gone to college.
Speaker 6 (26:29):
Yeah, I mean, when I think about the cost of college,
I graduated sixteen years ago, I think college is now
twice It costs twice what it was when I was there,
and I remember even like five years out, it was
like fifty percent more, Like I couldn't how could college
possibly get any more expensive? So I would say there's
definitely a sense of like, how could this possibly be
worth it? That said, it doesn't change the kinds of
(26:51):
jobs that people want that still are paying more than
jobs that don't require degrees. But I do think there
is a feeling of like I have been failed. And
one thing that we did find is that this is
an education problem. This is like colleges having majors and
class sizes for those majors that are too big. It
is schools not working with each other to make sure
(27:12):
that each class is going to have x many graduates,
and across the country in this field where there's not
going to be jobs. Like the education system in this
way is like actually totally broken, just as like the
application process for.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Jobs is also totally broken.
Speaker 6 (27:27):
So there's like these two very broken systems that young
people are dealing with. It is still true that the
unemployment rate for people with a college degree is lower
than people who haven't graduated from college, and even for
people with high school diploma, it's lower than people who
don't have a high school diploma.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Do you feel like.
Speaker 5 (27:51):
The broken promise is more like a feeling about the
future prospects or is this an underemployment thing that's maybe
not being captured in those numbers.
Speaker 8 (28:00):
You know.
Speaker 6 (28:00):
One thing to note too is that it is not
like the jobs that these that you are taking when
you are under employed are great either. When you know,
we look at trades, I think there's been all this
conversation recently about tech leaders saying we're going to need
all these electricians and plumbers, but actually there's been this
total plateau. I think in the last year there's been
a net loss of one hundred and fifty thousand jobs
(28:22):
in the trades, and Trump said tariffs are going to
bring back blue collar jobs. But actually no, it's like
made manufacturing more expensive, it has made repair work more expensive,
and the data just really does not support that these
data center builds for AI are going to you know,
result in sort of this boom of electricians and plumbers.
Speaker 5 (28:40):
So looking at the trends as they are now and
assuming that AI does indeed become a bigger part of
our economy and more jobs are displaced and things like that,
like where do you see this group of workers and
would be workers heading Like what does what does this
look like in the next ten years?
Speaker 4 (29:00):
Hard question?
Speaker 6 (29:01):
I mean, I think people really don't know because I
think again, there still is this open question on like
a I like, is AI going to decimate the entry
level you know, job market slash of the job market period?
Is it something that is really going to augment it?
You know, we've already seen like fewer computer science majors
in the last year. I do think what what kids
are deciding to study is going to change, But we
(29:22):
really we really just kind of don't know. I think,
you know, one thing brad Stone or editor in chief said,
it's like, you know, should there be sort of like
an AI apprenticeship program?
Speaker 4 (29:31):
Wait, what does that mean?
Speaker 2 (29:32):
I was wondering, is that does that like, does that
mean like you learn how to use AI or are.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
You like on the job training or are you apprentice because.
Speaker 4 (29:40):
A new major you just have to you just can't
get bad.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
I think it's like training programs.
Speaker 6 (29:45):
I think it is like, here is you know how
to use this technology for you know, X, y Z
line of work?
Speaker 3 (29:50):
I mean, you know.
Speaker 6 (29:51):
Another example he had is, you know, we are the
US subsidizes you know, med school right and all around
the world there are educational programs that are subsidized and
also really pushed, whether they be trade programs you know,
or other ways to really kind of like boost this
entry level workforce. So my very unsatisfying answer is like,
I don't think anyone knows what is going to happen.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
This is often cyclical, but AI, if.
Speaker 6 (30:15):
It really is this you know, paradigm shifting thing, what
will the cycles really look like?
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Julia, you need to stick around because we're going to
talk about paradigm shifts even more can when we get to.
Speaker 4 (30:29):
The underrated stories.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
See you then, Stacy, Julia, I mentioned a paradigm shift,
and I've got a big one.
Speaker 4 (30:44):
The underrated story some people have probably seen this.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
I'm not even sure if it's underrated, but it's just
so stupid that I can't not talk about it.
Speaker 4 (30:51):
Remember All Birds, those doors look.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
Like the hippie shoes. Yeah, I bought them for my dad.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
I was just gonna say they were the sneakers that
like your least cool friend was really school dad, or
like if you were like a white collar worker working
in a business casual workplace, like it's like a sensible
it's the floor sheime of sneakers.
Speaker 4 (31:13):
Anyway, they were really big.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
For like a hot second, I'm trying to remember what
the height of All Birds was.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
I guess it was like covid era, yeah, or like.
Speaker 6 (31:21):
Righte pre pandemic it was like because it was also
very much like direct to consumer.
Speaker 4 (31:25):
Boom direct to consumer.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
And then we all got cozy, and then All Birds
spacked and for a brief amount of time it was
very valuable.
Speaker 4 (31:34):
And then this came up last week. It was sold.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
It had been worth billions of dollars, it had been
worth four billion dollars. It was sold for thirty nine million.
But what I found out today on Bloomberg dot com
a great website that people should check out if they haven't.
Is that actually they did not sell All Birds. They
just sold the shoes part of the business and the
other part of the business is pivoting. Can you guess
(31:59):
what the pivot is too, Julia and Stacey?
Speaker 3 (32:02):
I can I already write read the story. But it's
crazy AI.
Speaker 4 (32:07):
They're going AI. They're gonna do GPUs or something. I
don't think anyone involved with this really knows. But it
is now called New Bird. AI. They got fifty million
bucks and the stock sword.
Speaker 5 (32:19):
They were always running into the future, but now instead
of running with shoes, they're running metaphorically.
Speaker 3 (32:27):
Well, I think it totally fits.
Speaker 6 (32:28):
Makes this idea though, that you were like this part
of the company. The whole part of the company was shoes.
This is not the name of the name, so it's
not like.
Speaker 4 (32:36):
It's not even the name actually because now it's called
New Bird.
Speaker 6 (32:38):
They were never one of these companies that were actually
a tech company. Also, wasn't their whole thing, like were
sustainable and you know it's not sustainable.
Speaker 3 (32:45):
AI.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
I never had a pair of All Birds, but I
knew many people who did. And I guess the thinking
here is that brand that really strong All Birds brand
it could be the AI company that those all Birds
enthusias patronize.
Speaker 4 (33:01):
That's my best guess.
Speaker 3 (33:02):
I don't know I did learn the term. I mean,
I don't even know if I can say it out loud.
Speaker 6 (33:07):
GPU ass like SaaS, but for GPUs, GPUs.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
Does IPUs as a cert GPUs wos W that's correct.
Speaker 6 (33:18):
That is correct, so you know, and like their whole
thing is going to be like hardware, which I don't know.
Maybe makes sense because it's like they're making a physical product,
but in every other regard it does not make any
sense at all.
Speaker 4 (33:28):
Yeah, stocks up three hundred and seventy three percent today,
That's all I know. That's real. Market is never wrong.
We will follow this.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
I can only imagine this could really we may have
to retrack the early part of the show when we
talk about AI because All Birds could ship new bird
AI could shake it up potentially.
Speaker 4 (33:44):
Stacy, what's your underrated story? Okay?
Speaker 5 (33:48):
Mine is it's a little bit of a conglomeration of
all the news that we've been hearing. But it is
this new term that I started to see this week
that I found very illuminating. It is from Nate Hagen's
a podcaster and he said, we are now living in
the Mortor economy, or for the uninitiated, is in Lord
(34:13):
of the Rings. It is the dystopian kingdom that tries
to take over everything. But what he specifically meant, and
why I think this is actually really interesting, is that
it's an economy that's all about energy, and energy prices
get more expensive, so the economy has to make more
energy in order to feed the energy needs, and it
(34:34):
becomes like a snake swallowing its own tail. And I
feel like this moment is very much the Mortor economy.
Between electricity prices going nuts because of data centers, and
also because Canada cut us off, oil prices going nuts,
natural gas prices going nuts, fertilizers made of a lot
of natural gas, so that means food prices are going
(34:54):
to go up, and our whole economy is becoming about
making energy the it is then consumed and becomes more expensive.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
The mortar economy. I mean, it just feels like something
that didn't have to happen.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Okay, My critique here is more with the term is.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
That the only thing going on with mortar that they're
using energy.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
I feel like this is like a fundamentally confusing analogy.
Speaker 3 (35:20):
What do you think was going on with Mortar?
Speaker 2 (35:22):
It's like a totalitarian stake. They're trying to take over
the world and get the one ring of power.
Speaker 4 (35:26):
I don't know. I'm not a Lord of the Rings.
Speaker 6 (35:28):
Guy, but it may be a better analogy than you
even thought.
Speaker 4 (35:31):
Who's sore on and who are the trees? And I'm like,
where are the hobbits?
Speaker 2 (35:36):
I just I'm having written a lot about guys who
are really into Lord of the Rings.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
I'm afraid I may have, like.
Speaker 5 (35:42):
You may be very sensitive to this Stophore. It doesn't
line up at all. That is possibly true, But I
do think there is something really interesting about an economy
where energy starts to get so expensive. There's some really
chilling statistics, including that for low income people, they're now
spending about twenty percent of their income on energy. That's
(36:03):
gas and electricity and everything, twenty percent of their income.
And I agree with you, Max, And maybe the finer
points of Mortar are like and that's difficult.
Speaker 4 (36:14):
The eye of sourn.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
Is it was with you too, the eye of Soren's
Our economy was about so much more than energy.
Speaker 4 (36:24):
Listeners, if you have a Lord of the Rings related take.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Yes, Oh my god, all everybody at Everybody's at Bloomberg
dot that's everybody's with an S. Is it the mortar economy?
And if so, who are the orcs?
Speaker 4 (36:38):
Let us know. This show is produced by Jasmine, J. T.
Green and Stacy Wong.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
Magnus Hendrickson is our supervising producer, Sam Rogich handles engineering,
and Dave per Cell factions. Special thanks to Jeff Muscus,
Julia Rubin, Reeling, Rachel Lewis, and Angel Recchio. If you
have a minute, please rate and review the show.
Speaker 4 (37:04):
It means a lot to us.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
And if you have a story that should be our business,
send us an email at Everybody's at Bloomberg dot net.
That's everybody with an S at the end at Bloomberg
dot net. Thank you for listening and we will see
you next week.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Stacey, there's been so much talk here and elsewhere on
Wall Street in the business press about AI, your favorite subject,
saving the world, changing our lives, curing cancer, solving climate.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Change, talking to whales, talking.
Speaker 4 (00:26):
To whales, or your favorite thing.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Almost everyone agrees AI is awesome as far as I
can tell. But there is starting to be quite a
lot of backlash as well, including some very upsetting incidents.
Speaker 5 (00:38):
Yes, there's actually been some violence, including against Open AI
CEO Sam Alman recently. And you're right, it definitely seems
like a lot of the excitement and optimism around AI
has become at least more complicated.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
There may be an erosion in our ability to learn
how to compromise with others, to learn how to collaborate
with others, like people who actually give us pushback, shape
how we feel, teach us things. Yeah, this is all existential.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
We're going to hear about more of that from Bloomberg
reporter Sarah Fryer. We're talking about what these threats and
attempts at harm say about this current moment and the
conversation around AI.
Speaker 5 (01:17):
And after that, Max, we are going to talk about
the job market. It is tough out there, especially for
young job seekers, especially if you just graduated. And Business
Week's latest issue is all about that, what it is
like to be young and just starting out in your career.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
College graduates, recent graduates, we see you.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
And even better, we have BusinessWeek Senior editor Julia Rubin
here to break it all down for us.
Speaker 6 (01:41):
It's very interesting and this idea of Okay, if we
are sort of automating away the grunt work or the
sort of technical work, then perhaps like the work that
is more about.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Being a human is going to be much more important.
Speaker 5 (01:58):
This is everybody's business from Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
I'm Stacy Vannox.
Speaker 5 (02:02):
Smith and I'm Max Chafkin Jobs AI. It is all
happening this week, and it is a lot, but stick
around and Max, we can just all process this together.
Speaker 7 (02:18):
This morning, dramatic new surveillance images of a man authorities
say tried to kill open AI CEO Sam Altman by
throwing a Molotov cocktail at his home. Investigators have charged
twenty year old Daniel Marino Gamma with attempted murder Stacy.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Just a few days ago, as we're talking now, there
was this attempted arson attack on the home of Sam Altman,
the CEO and co founder of Open Ai. And there's
a lot to say about this, and about to say
about the manifesto that this guy wrote, But I think
it also maybe says something about the current sentiment, the
(02:54):
broader sentiment about AI in general.
Speaker 5 (02:57):
Yeah, I think so too. This attack, by the way,
is not the only one. Last week in Indianapolis, a
local councilman who had approved the construction of this big
new data center in the area had bullets fired at
his front door, along with.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
This note that read no data centers.
Speaker 5 (03:12):
It definitely seems like some of the kind of excitement
and optimism around AI has has turned or at least
gotten a little more complicated.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Yeah, and we've got a great person talked about this.
It is Sarah Fryar, Bloomberg Managing editor, a longtime reporter.
She wrote a book all about Facebook and kind of
the last time tech was under the microscope. It's called
No Filter, The Inside Story of Instagram. Sarah, Welcome to
everybody's business.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
All right, So, Sarah, I feel like just a couple
of weeks ago, we were talking about how the ais
were going to be our friends, and they were going
to do all our work and they were going to
usher in a glorious new future. Now we've got these
attacks we mentioned too, there was actually a second attack
on Sam Almon's house. And when you look the poll
(04:00):
numbers about this, there have been a bunch of polls
in and AI is pretty unpopular.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
And I'm wondering what's your read on this.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
It did something change or are people just paying attention
to something that was there the whole time.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Well, I think it's a big change when something goes
from a cool new tool you can play with to
the reason people thinks jobs are going away, the reason
young people can't find careers when they graduate from college
or grad school, the reason the environment is under stressed,
(04:35):
energy prices are high. There are these existential things that
are tied up in the progress of AI. It may
be of help to us for particular tasks or questions
or coding projects and what have you, But the vast
majority of people are not seeing yet the way that
(04:56):
AI is enriching them. Instead, they're seeing the way that
it's taking things away, whether that's employment or resources, or
just the threat that it might one day take something
away and part of that, I think is the company's
own ful the way that they have marketed this technology
as like, really, this is so powerful, we need to
roll this out slowly, take our time, because if we don't,
(05:19):
the results could be disastrous.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
They've literally been saying our technology might end the world.
It might be that sam Altman, including the Samlman, might
be as bad as a nuclear weapon. And also it
very likely will take everyone's.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Jobs, which is why you should buy it from us,
because at least we're saying the truth right it is.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
The matingment is that.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
It is the strangest public relations strategy of all time.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Honesty, it's never a good idea in pr.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
These companies that have that have spoken about the power
and danger and incredible uncontrollableness of AI may actually be
stoking real fear in regular people who think they have
to do something about it. And of course no condonement
of violence, but you don't have to go too far
(06:06):
in the logic to get somebody to that place where
they fear AI and think that they're doing the right
thing by trying to stop it. Obviously that's the wrong
way to do it, but there are people having these
philosophical even religious debates in Silicon Valley right now about
what AI is bringing to change our future and how
(06:29):
much of it we should be embracing. And then there's
the other side of that, which is like, how much
of that is just marketing talk?
Speaker 5 (06:36):
Sarah, I feel like this is such a similar thing
that's happened throughout history, Like back in the eighteen eighties,
there were the Luddites and the saboteurs who threw their
shoes into the machines because they saw those machines as
threatening their jobs. The Luddites would go with tools and
smash the big textile machines apart.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Do you see this as like that or is this different?
Speaker 5 (06:58):
Is this just the human reaction to an existential job
threat from a new technology.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
I think even within the companies there's a lot of
this kind of debate, and Anthropic has made this part
of their brand, the fact that they're thinking all the
time about how do we not just enact AI progress,
but do it in a way that takes into account
everything that could go wrong, Because once we release it
(07:26):
on the world, we may not be able to control it.
So we have to make sure that what we release
is something that is at least understood, and I think
that's almost impossible because there's some level of complexity to
these models where we don't exactly know how they come
to the conclusions that they come to, and they're driving
their conclusions from a lot of different sources. They're building
(07:48):
upon the human knowledge that they've ingested, and they're really
only as good as how they've been trained. But I
think that does get us to an uncomfortable place where
on the one hand, you have people trying to do
whatever they can to build as quickly as they can
and take advantage of the new technology, and then you
(08:08):
have people who are too scared to even touch it.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Can I bring up a few sort of data points
and some polling here I alluded to it at the top.
But in September of twenty twenty five, Pew, the big
survey people, released their latest survey about how people feel
about AI, and the numbers are really stark, and I
think you go back to how people felt about smartphones
(08:34):
or cloud computing or any of these other recent technology developments,
it feels different. So in twenty twenty one, eighteen percent
of people were more excited than concerned about AI, and
thirty seven percent of the people were more concerned than excited.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
So a lot of concern about AI.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Four years later, there's been a lot more AI, a
lot of people have had contact with this technology, and
the numbers have gotten way worse. Fifty percent more concerned
than excited, ten percent more excited than concerned, a huge,
huge majority. And then the by far the biggest thing
in the survey is more concerned.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
And then the second part of this this is.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Showing up of course, in politics, people getting upset about
data centers in their backyard, Bernie Sanders saying, we need
to have a pause on data centers. But the thing
that really grabbed me in the survey was not the
top line. But then they went and asked people, Okay,
what are you concerned about, Sarah. You brought up a
bunch of things. You brought up the environment, you brought
(09:35):
up job loss, there was one other. When I heard
about this, I thought, okay, yeah, so people are probably
worried about it's probably economic anxiety, right, They've been hearing
these stories about job loss. It has got to be
the main thing. But you look at this survey. They
asked of the people who are most concerned, the top
problem was not job loss. It was erodes human abilities
and connections that was twenty seven percent eighteen negative impact
(09:58):
on accuracy of information. Next one concerns over human control
of AI, and then job losses all the way at
number five. The fifth most concern, the environment, which you
hear a lot about on the news, is way down there.
It's almost at the very bottom, like two percent. And
then then my favorite is general dislike, which is just
one percent. That's the lowest.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
One's So it's so interesting.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
I they're like spiritual concerns that people have, right, they
are worried about job loss, but they're also worried about
these more fundamental questions.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
It's crazy loneliness, and you have people like Mark Zuckerberg
who are offering up AI as an antidote to loneliness,
while our social media feeds become full of AI slop.
One thing I think that is different about this era
of new tech compared to the past waves is this
(10:48):
is not as clear a game of disrupting the giants
as past eras of new tech have been. Normally, when
when you have this like big powerful new startup, they're
coming in to fight the incumbent. We've just come off
of a couple decades of sour feelings about big tech.
(11:12):
These AI giants don't exist without big tech. They're collaborating,
they're in deep business partnerships, deep financial partnerships.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
They need each other.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
And I think that means that a lot of the
sentiment and distrust that people have about Facebook, about Google,
about all these companies that they've just built up an
aversion to over antitrust over their personal data over all
of these things over the past few years, and yet
we keep using them because they're the best options.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
We have.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
A lot of that is trickling over to the AI era,
and people are thinking of these companies sort of in
the same boat. I think, if you're like a young
person today and you're being told you can't be on
social media or it's dangerous to be on social media,
what are you going to do with your time? You're
probably gonna talk to chat EBT. I just think that
(12:07):
as a substitute for human connection, it's going to be
a big enhancement in some ways because it's something that
will always respond, will always be there, will always give
you an answer. But it's but there may be an
erosion in our ability to learn how to compromise with others,
to learn how to collaborate with others, like people who
(12:28):
actually give us pushback shape how we feel, teach us things. Yeah,
this is all existential to.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
Get a little more practical though.
Speaker 5 (12:38):
AI is really, it feels like, in many ways, kind
of holding up our economy right now. Obviously the Magnificent
seven stocks, which are all very deeply invested, if not
making AI, are really carrying the markets, which has been
one of the real bright spots in the economy lately.
I mean, how big a part of our economy is
(12:59):
A Like, even if we're worried about it and there
are all these mixed feelings that are surfacing, do we
need it?
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (13:06):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:06):
The top four tech companies are spending six hundred and
fifty billion dollars on data centers this year. Like, that's insane.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
It's insane.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
It's not insane if you think about what the capacity
needs of AI are, it's just unprecedented. And yeah, that
is fueling the economy, But how much of that money
is trickling down to everyday people who are going to
the grocery store and seeing prices higher than It's just
there's a disconnect right now between the spending and who
(13:36):
is receiving the benefits of having an ai economy, And
I think that's going to show up in the midterms
later this year.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Sarah, before we let you go, I'm just curious. You're
talking to us from San Francisco. Big tech is your beat.
We haven't mentioned the name Luigi Mangioni, but I remember
when the United Health CEO was assassinated, there was a
lot of in talking to sources and stuff. They were afraid,
and I think are still afraid. And I'm curious whether
(14:06):
you're picking up that same level of anxiety, Like are
people aware of the potential for violence, for this kind
of generalized anxiety to spill into something scary.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
I think that there has been a lot of thought
put into executive security in the wake of the United
Healthcare shooting, and even before that. Mark Zuckerberg he has
millions of dollars each year spent on the security of
him and his family. A lot of executives, including Sam Altman,
(14:41):
have spoken of building bunkers at their properties, maybe even
for more than.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Zuckerberg has a bunker on Kawaie.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
I think, yeah, plenty of them have bunkers.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Again, not a great public relations strategy talking about your bunkers, right.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
The logos might not love that, right.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
And I don't know if the bunkers are to protect
from angry citizenry or to protect from the AI apocalypse.
Speaker 4 (15:04):
I'm not quite sure. Sarah Fryar, thanks for being here,
Thanks for.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Having me.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Max.
Speaker 5 (15:17):
One of the things I think we've talked about, maybe
more than almost anything else, is jobs, the job market,
which has been just the source of a lot of
distress and a lot of worry for years now.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah, and it's been especially bad for young job seekers,
for people who are sort of leaving school and trying
to find their first job or their first internship.
Speaker 4 (15:42):
It's tough out there.
Speaker 5 (15:43):
It is tough out there, Yeah, for young job seekers.
The unemployment rate, I think is almost two times what
it is for overall job seekers. And the situation for
overall job seekers isn't great either. And we wanted to
see what it feels like for people who are young
and maybe just starting out in their careers or just
about to enter the job market. And so we sent
(16:04):
our producer Jasmine JT Green out onto the streets of
New York to talk to some young people and ask
them what their job situation is right now.
Speaker 8 (16:14):
I think current job market in the US is really limited,
especially to like international students like me, especially who doesn't
have any like US citizenship or a green card or something.
Speaker 9 (16:26):
That I'm a student, and what I've heard is it's
really difficult to get a job right now, depends what
worlds we're in. But I'm studying biology, hopefully to be
a dentist. And for me, it's been really difficult to
find like internship stuff like that boost my resume and
eventually get a better job.
Speaker 10 (16:41):
For me, trying to get a job in New York City,
like a part time job, it's really hard and I
I've been unemployed for a few months now and it's
hard to get another.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
Part time job. What would you say It's the most
difficult part.
Speaker 9 (16:56):
Having connections in like knowing who to reach out to
to find what you want, because I feel like cold
emailing a lot of the time doesn't really work, So
I feel like having connections that can really get you
a job is definitely the hardest part.
Speaker 8 (17:09):
English is my second language and kind of I think
it's really hard for me to engage like people in
a community.
Speaker 9 (17:16):
And stuff like that.
Speaker 10 (17:17):
I think that there's just a high demand for jobs
and there aren't enough. And also yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
High demand for jobs, and that tells the story.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
You know what's interesting for me to hearing this.
Speaker 5 (17:31):
I feel like, you know, all all the time, there
are things that give you a leg up in the
job market, right if you're looking for a job in
your native language, if you have citizenship in the place
where you're looking for a job, if you have connections,
all these things that are always an advantage in the
job market. I think when the job market gets tight,
it becomes like a really really hard to get a job.
(17:53):
If you don't have those things, I mean, they would
always be a leg up, but all of a sudden,
it's like almost impossible to get a job. If you
don't have like every conceivable advantage, then it becomes impossible.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
We're talking about this, of course, because in the brand
new issue of Bloomberg Business Week, we have a whole
bunch of stories all about first jobs.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
This is an awesome.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Collection of this combination of sort of trend stories and
first person and interviews. It's all about what things look
like right now for young people, what does it mean
for their careers, but also for all of us we
have Julia Rubin. She is a BusinessWeek editor. Our colleague
is here in the studio with us right now. Julia,
(18:33):
Welcome to everybody's business.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 6 (18:35):
I feel this is like a real, you know, longtime listener,
first time caller situation.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
So you know you're from the credit that's right.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Yeah, put together this show, and you also put together
this awesome issue.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Thank you, Yeah, I did.
Speaker 5 (18:48):
I want to start out really broadly, what does the
job market look like for young people right now?
Speaker 3 (18:53):
What are they up against? It's bad, It's not good.
Speaker 6 (18:57):
The unemployment numbers for young people are higher than the
unemployment numbers for the general population. And we are in
a time of overlapping crises right now, and many things
feel really bad, but this in particular is not good.
There are fewer entry level jobs, there are more people
applying to them. Young people being out of work is
really bad for the long term health of the economy.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
And not just young people, but particularly young people with
college degrees.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
That's one of the big and strange and upsetting trends.
I guess, especially if you're one of these people with
a college degree, is that historically your job prospects are
better if you have a college degree, and right now
that is that's not true, right, Julia?
Speaker 6 (19:38):
Yes, and no, Okay, there is an underemployment crisis, which
means that there are more degree hars than degree requiring jobs.
That said, degree requiring jobs are still going to make
you more money. It is still something that is incredibly desirable.
But if you are able to get a job right
(19:58):
now and you are young, it's very possible you're getting
a job that you did not need your two hundred
thousand dollars education for.
Speaker 5 (20:04):
What are some examples of this? Did they talk to
anybody who was unde employed in the issue? Because I
feel like we see numbers for unemployed, and I believe
the unemployment numbers for eighteen to twenty four year olds
is I think it's like over eight percent.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
It's really high. But underemployment the data is a little harder. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (20:22):
I think the most interesting place and the most kind
of salient place to start is like engineers and computer
science grats, because from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty four,
entry level openings for those kinds of roles grew about
six percent. However, graduates of those fields or into those
fields grew by one hundred and ten percent, So there
is this huge mismatch between eighty set.
Speaker 4 (20:43):
So learn to code right now, and they lie.
Speaker 6 (20:45):
And you know what, I didn't learn to code, and look,
we are not recent college grads.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
But there you go. But no, totally.
Speaker 6 (20:51):
And I think this is a field where AI and
theory is starting to have some impact.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
But also there's a lot of AI washing.
Speaker 6 (20:57):
These companies hired too much during the pandemic, and now
they're blaming AI for layoffs when like, that's not really
the reason why yet at least that they are slashing jobs.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Juliet at the beginning of this issue of about first
jobs and early career workers, there's this really staggering chart
that compares essentially the unemployment rate for recent college graduates,
people between the ages of twenty two and twenty seven,
and everybody else. And until looking at it about what
(21:27):
like twenty twenty, for a very long time is fourteen
years or so, fifteen years, the recent college graduates had
a much lower unemployment rate than the rest of us.
And basically, if you were a recent grad, you were
golden compared to the average worker. And it flipped and
that I think maybe gets to the core of a
(21:50):
lot of the kind of anxiety you hear from young workers,
as well as conversations around AI. Is this a crisis
and how bad is it?
Speaker 3 (21:58):
I mean, it's totally complicated. No one knows anything yet.
Speaker 6 (22:01):
There are definitely people saying, okay, AI is going to
you know, wipe out the bottom bottom rung of the
ladder and the entry level jobs, the work that entry
level workers are doing.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
That's the easiest stuff to be automated.
Speaker 6 (22:14):
There are also people who are like, actually, this is
going to create all of these jobs, and it's actually
just going to sort of change the nature of what
these first jobs look like. They'll be way more valuable.
And there is this class of what we're calling AI natives,
though I don't really know if I totally agree with that,
because people who are graduating in the class of twenty
twenty six have had access to these large language models
(22:37):
their entire college career.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
They've been cheating on their college classes fast years.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
How they are ready to be management consultants.
Speaker 6 (22:43):
But your children are actually the AI natives, right, because
it's like, if you're like an elementary school, you are
growing up with the technology in the same way that
we did with the internet, and then like social life,
you did that, I did that. I'm very young. I
don't know if you can sell. But yeah, so it's
there is some level of AI fluency, but there's also dependency.
You're also having these kind of recent grads or sometimes
(23:06):
college students going into these internships and they know how
to use these tools way better than anyone else in
the workplace does, but they know nothing about the subject
matter that they are actually, you.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
Know, using the models for. There's also a lot of
soft skill stuff that they may not know.
Speaker 6 (23:20):
They don't know how to present the slide deck that
is being made for them by the AI.
Speaker 4 (23:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
One of my favorite parts of this issue, there's a
story about management consultants, and the funny thing is it
seems like a lot of the anxiety among the people
who run management consultancies is not about the entry level
employees so much as the idea that AI slop might
be somewhat indistinguishable from the normal output of a management consultancy,
(23:46):
and that is manifesting in that they really want to
make sure that their junior associates whatever they're called, have
soft skills that they don't just sound like they're reciting
points on a PowerPoint created by a chatbot, and that's where.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
We're hearing too. It's oh, like we really want English majors.
Speaker 6 (24:02):
And that's like a cross across the spectrum now, which
is also like a joke, because when we graduated it
was like again, got to be an engineer, got to
be a business major, whatever, And so a lot of that.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
I think is down to me.
Speaker 6 (24:12):
I'm but learn to ode, learn to owde man.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
I didn't even it wasn't even an English major.
Speaker 9 (24:19):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (24:20):
But yeah, it's very interesting and this idea of Okay,
if we are sort of automating away the grunt work
or the sort of technical work, then perhaps like the
work that is more about being a human is going
to be much more important.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
Julia.
Speaker 5 (24:36):
A lot of times young people, especially in difficult job markets,
get the short end of the stick.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
So a lot of times.
Speaker 5 (24:43):
You will see unemployment much higher for younger people than
it is.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
For the rest of the workforce.
Speaker 5 (24:51):
Do you see this moment as different from previous downturns
in that way? Is this moment harder on young workers
than like the housing crisis, the financial crash were, or
is this sort of the same.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
Young workers are always going to be the first impacted.
Speaker 6 (25:07):
It's like when there is like a soft job market,
like that is who is going to have the most trouble.
But what's interesting is unemployment is way higher during two
thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, twenty ten when
I graduated, but the overall unemployment was higher than for
recent grads and that is flipped now, And I think
that is something that is like really interesting and like
really concerning because people are not able to enter the
(25:29):
market and then they're not able to build their careers.
There's also this like horrible research that is not being
able to get a first job is going to impact
your I think it's like your salary for the first
ten years. Also, higher rates of divorce, You're going to
have fewer kids, There's like worse health outcomes, there's higher mortality.
It's really bad when unemployment for young people is up
(25:51):
above the general population.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
One thing I've wondered about at part this conversation has
made me sometimes a little bit on comfortable because so
much of it seems to be about class and about
the expectation that going to college will vault you above
people who don't go to college, and the fact that
that is breaking down feels like a violation of some
(26:17):
sort of social contract in the reporting for this, for
these stories, are you picking up anything like that any
young people being like, no, they should have not learned
a code. But maybe I shouldn't have gone to college.
Speaker 6 (26:29):
Yeah, I mean, when I think about the cost of college,
I graduated sixteen years ago, I think college is now
twice It costs twice what it was when I was there,
and I remember even like five years out, it was
like fifty percent more, Like I couldn't how could college
possibly get any more expensive? So I would say there's
definitely a sense of like, how could this possibly be
worth it? That said, it doesn't change the kinds of
(26:51):
jobs that people want that still are paying more than
jobs that don't require degrees. But I do think there
is a feeling of like I have been failed. And
one thing that we did find is that this is
an education problem. This is like colleges having majors and
class sizes for those majors that are too big. It
is schools not working with each other to make sure
(27:12):
that each class is going to have x many graduates,
and across the country in this field where there's not
going to be jobs. Like the education system in this
way is like actually totally broken, just as like the
application process for.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Jobs is also totally broken.
Speaker 6 (27:27):
So there's like these two very broken systems that young
people are dealing with. It is still true that the
unemployment rate for people with a college degree is lower
than people who haven't graduated from college, and even for
people with high school diploma, it's lower than people who
don't have a high school diploma.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Do you feel like.
Speaker 5 (27:51):
The broken promise is more like a feeling about the
future prospects or is this an underemployment thing that's maybe
not being captured in those numbers.
Speaker 8 (28:00):
You know.
Speaker 6 (28:00):
One thing to note too is that it is not
like the jobs that these that you are taking when
you are under employed are great either. When you know,
we look at trades, I think there's been all this
conversation recently about tech leaders saying we're going to need
all these electricians and plumbers, but actually there's been this
total plateau. I think in the last year there's been
a net loss of one hundred and fifty thousand jobs
(28:22):
in the trades, and Trump said tariffs are going to
bring back blue collar jobs. But actually no, it's like
made manufacturing more expensive, it has made repair work more expensive,
and the data just really does not support that these
data center builds for AI are going to you know,
result in sort of this boom of electricians and plumbers.
Speaker 5 (28:40):
So looking at the trends as they are now and
assuming that AI does indeed become a bigger part of
our economy and more jobs are displaced and things like that,
like where do you see this group of workers and
would be workers heading Like what does what does this
look like in the next ten years?
Speaker 4 (29:00):
Hard question?
Speaker 6 (29:01):
I mean, I think people really don't know because I
think again, there still is this open question on like
a I like, is AI going to decimate the entry
level you know, job market slash of the job market period?
Is it something that is really going to augment it?
You know, we've already seen like fewer computer science majors
in the last year. I do think what what kids
are deciding to study is going to change, But we
(29:22):
really we really just kind of don't know. I think,
you know, one thing brad Stone or editor in chief said,
it's like, you know, should there be sort of like
an AI apprenticeship program?
Speaker 4 (29:31):
Wait, what does that mean?
Speaker 2 (29:32):
I was wondering, is that does that like, does that
mean like you learn how to use AI or are.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
You like on the job training or are you apprentice because.
Speaker 4 (29:40):
A new major you just have to you just can't
get bad.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
I think it's like training programs.
Speaker 6 (29:45):
I think it is like, here is you know how
to use this technology for you know, X, y Z
line of work?
Speaker 3 (29:50):
I mean, you know.
Speaker 6 (29:51):
Another example he had is, you know, we are the
US subsidizes you know, med school right and all around
the world there are educational programs that are subsidized and
also really pushed, whether they be trade programs you know,
or other ways to really kind of like boost this
entry level workforce. So my very unsatisfying answer is like,
I don't think anyone knows what is going to happen.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
This is often cyclical, but AI, if.
Speaker 6 (30:15):
It really is this you know, paradigm shifting thing, what
will the cycles really look like?
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Julia, you need to stick around because we're going to
talk about paradigm shifts even more can when we get to.
Speaker 4 (30:29):
The underrated stories.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
See you then, Stacy, Julia, I mentioned a paradigm shift,
and I've got a big one.
Speaker 4 (30:44):
The underrated story some people have probably seen this.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
I'm not even sure if it's underrated, but it's just
so stupid that I can't not talk about it.
Speaker 4 (30:51):
Remember All Birds, those doors look.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
Like the hippie shoes. Yeah, I bought them for my dad.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
I was just gonna say they were the sneakers that
like your least cool friend was really school dad, or
like if you were like a white collar worker working
in a business casual workplace, like it's like a sensible
it's the floor sheime of sneakers.
Speaker 4 (31:13):
Anyway, they were really big.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
For like a hot second, I'm trying to remember what
the height of All Birds was.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
I guess it was like covid era, yeah, or like.
Speaker 6 (31:21):
Righte pre pandemic it was like because it was also
very much like direct to consumer.
Speaker 4 (31:25):
Boom direct to consumer.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
And then we all got cozy, and then All Birds
spacked and for a brief amount of time it was
very valuable.
Speaker 4 (31:34):
And then this came up last week. It was sold.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
It had been worth billions of dollars, it had been
worth four billion dollars. It was sold for thirty nine million.
But what I found out today on Bloomberg dot com
a great website that people should check out if they haven't.
Is that actually they did not sell All Birds. They
just sold the shoes part of the business and the
other part of the business is pivoting. Can you guess
(31:59):
what the pivot is too, Julia and Stacey?
Speaker 3 (32:02):
I can I already write read the story. But it's
crazy AI.
Speaker 4 (32:07):
They're going AI. They're gonna do GPUs or something. I
don't think anyone involved with this really knows. But it
is now called New Bird. AI. They got fifty million
bucks and the stock sword.
Speaker 5 (32:19):
They were always running into the future, but now instead
of running with shoes, they're running metaphorically.
Speaker 3 (32:27):
Well, I think it totally fits.
Speaker 6 (32:28):
Makes this idea though, that you were like this part
of the company. The whole part of the company was shoes.
This is not the name of the name, so it's
not like.
Speaker 4 (32:36):
It's not even the name actually because now it's called
New Bird.
Speaker 6 (32:38):
They were never one of these companies that were actually
a tech company. Also, wasn't their whole thing, like were
sustainable and you know it's not sustainable.
Speaker 3 (32:45):
AI.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
I never had a pair of All Birds, but I
knew many people who did. And I guess the thinking
here is that brand that really strong All Birds brand
it could be the AI company that those all Birds
enthusias patronize.
Speaker 4 (33:01):
That's my best guess.
Speaker 3 (33:02):
I don't know I did learn the term. I mean,
I don't even know if I can say it out loud.
Speaker 6 (33:07):
GPU ass like SaaS, but for GPUs, GPUs.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
Does IPUs as a cert GPUs wos W that's correct.
Speaker 6 (33:18):
That is correct, so you know, and like their whole
thing is going to be like hardware, which I don't know.
Maybe makes sense because it's like they're making a physical product,
but in every other regard it does not make any
sense at all.
Speaker 4 (33:28):
Yeah, stocks up three hundred and seventy three percent today,
That's all I know. That's real. Market is never wrong.
We will follow this.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
I can only imagine this could really we may have
to retrack the early part of the show when we
talk about AI because All Birds could ship new bird
AI could shake it up potentially.
Speaker 4 (33:44):
Stacy, what's your underrated story? Okay?
Speaker 5 (33:48):
Mine is it's a little bit of a conglomeration of
all the news that we've been hearing. But it is
this new term that I started to see this week
that I found very illuminating. It is from Nate Hagen's
a podcaster and he said, we are now living in
the Mortor economy, or for the uninitiated, is in Lord
(34:13):
of the Rings. It is the dystopian kingdom that tries
to take over everything. But what he specifically meant, and
why I think this is actually really interesting, is that
it's an economy that's all about energy, and energy prices
get more expensive, so the economy has to make more
energy in order to feed the energy needs, and it
(34:34):
becomes like a snake swallowing its own tail. And I
feel like this moment is very much the Mortor economy.
Between electricity prices going nuts because of data centers, and
also because Canada cut us off, oil prices going nuts,
natural gas prices going nuts, fertilizers made of a lot
of natural gas, so that means food prices are going
(34:54):
to go up, and our whole economy is becoming about
making energy the it is then consumed and becomes more expensive.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
The mortar economy. I mean, it just feels like something
that didn't have to happen.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Okay, My critique here is more with the term is.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
That the only thing going on with mortar that they're
using energy.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
I feel like this is like a fundamentally confusing analogy.
Speaker 3 (35:20):
What do you think was going on with Mortar?
Speaker 2 (35:22):
It's like a totalitarian stake. They're trying to take over
the world and get the one ring of power.
Speaker 4 (35:26):
I don't know. I'm not a Lord of the Rings.
Speaker 6 (35:28):
Guy, but it may be a better analogy than you
even thought.
Speaker 4 (35:31):
Who's sore on and who are the trees? And I'm like,
where are the hobbits?
Speaker 2 (35:36):
I just I'm having written a lot about guys who
are really into Lord of the Rings.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
I'm afraid I may have, like.
Speaker 5 (35:42):
You may be very sensitive to this Stophore. It doesn't
line up at all. That is possibly true, But I
do think there is something really interesting about an economy
where energy starts to get so expensive. There's some really
chilling statistics, including that for low income people, they're now
spending about twenty percent of their income on energy. That's
(36:03):
gas and electricity and everything, twenty percent of their income.
And I agree with you, Max, And maybe the finer
points of Mortar are like and that's difficult.
Speaker 4 (36:14):
The eye of sourn.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
Is it was with you too, the eye of Soren's
Our economy was about so much more than energy.
Speaker 4 (36:24):
Listeners, if you have a Lord of the Rings related take.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Yes, Oh my god, all everybody at Everybody's at Bloomberg
dot that's everybody's with an S. Is it the mortar economy?
And if so, who are the orcs?
Speaker 4 (36:38):
Let us know. This show is produced by Jasmine, J. T.
Green and Stacy Wong.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
Magnus Hendrickson is our supervising producer, Sam Rogich handles engineering,
and Dave per Cell factions. Special thanks to Jeff Muscus,
Julia Rubin, Reeling, Rachel Lewis, and Angel Recchio. If you
have a minute, please rate and review the show.
Speaker 4 (37:04):
It means a lot to us.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
And if you have a story that should be our business,
send us an email at Everybody's at Bloomberg dot net.
That's everybody with an S at the end at Bloomberg
dot net. Thank you for listening and we will see
you next week.
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