I SURVIVED: I Didn't Stop Running

Transcript

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show. Today on The James Altucher Show, The end of jobs. That's the title of Jeff Wald's new book, and he describes basically what's happening right now. Jobs, the way we traditionally think about it, are going away. He's got the facts, the stats, what's gonna happen, and what we all should do about it. There was some good news and there was some bad news, but it's very interesting. It's the history of jobs, the history of technology basically, and how technology has changed the job scenario. And and it was so many interesting things that I learned. So here's the interview with Jeff Wald, the end of Jobs. Welcome, Jeff Wald, author of the end of jobs, the rise of on demand workers and agile corporations. That this I never am a big fan of subtitles, Jeff, but I like that first part, the end of jobs. Welcome to the podcast. Well, thank you so much for having me. You started a company, Work Market, which is basically related to your book. It was, software to help companies deal with on demand workers. You raised something like 50,000,000 or 20 I forget how much you raised. But 70. $70,000,000. You sold it to ADP. So in January 22, 2018, my birthday, so congratulations. And happy birthday. Thank you. It was 2 years ago, my last birthday. But, the end of jobs, let's talk about it. Because I I agree with everything you say in the book. I I wrote a little about this in my book, choose yourself, how there was this end of I called it corporatism. You describe it in a different way. You you describe the evolution of work. So maybe let's start off with that. What's been the history of of work and the the natural evolution that has led to the end of jobs that you're foreseeing? And what do we do? People who lose their jobs, are they screwed? Like, what's gonna happen? There are a lot of things that are gonna happen, but to your point, it's good to study the history of it because, James, we've been here before. You know, we as a society, companies and workers coming together, we've gone through this kind of huge technological change before. And I'm not saying it's gonna happen exactly as it did in the past, but as we sit here and struggle to think about how it's going to play out, how workers should adjust, how companies should adjust, it's kinda wise to look and see what happened with mechanization, electrification, and computerization because all of those had that same tension of huge productivity increases, companies starting to abuse workers, workers being left behind, workers having stagnant wages, income gaps rising. How did they respond? And so let's think about that. Yeah. Let's start with that. Let's start with the beginning. So, originally, there was nothing. Right? So there was basically In the beginning. Surfs working the land, and they got paid in kind. Like, they got to live and eat and and so on. And then something the I didn't know this actually until I read your book. The first company was formed in 13/47. That was the first official corporation? That was the first official corporation in Sweden. Got a charter from the king. So what does that mean? Like because, like, a corporation now could be all sorts of things, but does that mean sort of limited liability in in that sense, or what what does a corporation mean in in 1347? In 1347, I'm not sure we know too much about what that corporation meant, but the idea that people would come together to pool resources as a means of production didn't really start taking shape. The first one was in 1347, but it didn't start taking shape until the industrial revolution where capital was needed to build factories and those are things that an individual on their own couldn't necessarily do. The idea of limited liability comes later, comes about a 100 years later. The English parliament passed the first in a series of laws that eventually led to what we know today as the corporation. But it took you know, it wasn't like corporations started and then we had the corporate structure figured out. These things evolve. There are fits and starts. And eventually, we figured out what was the right way legally to structure that corporation with limited liability. Let's discuss that. So, basically, we went from having no productivity resources. Like, things were only done if someone's hands built them, and then the industrial revolution began. Mechanization began. And that's you have 4 steps in the history of work. Mechanization is the first. What what happened? Well, you move from hand power to machine power, and that specifically manifested itself in the textile industry. You went from people taking cotton, creating thread, making yarn, knitting them into clothes, and that changed to the cotton gin, to the spinning Jenny, to the weaving loom. And you had what was estimated to be about a 600 times, not 600%, 600 times increase in productivity. And that was a game changer. Yeah. It's worth understanding. Like, what actually then happened? Well, then people said, wow. With this increase in productivity, we can produce more. But importantly, in order to run a factory, quote, unquote I'm air quoting right now in case we're not in order to run a factory, you needed to hire a lot of people. You needed to buy all of these machines, and so it wasn't any longer somebody working in their cottage at at at an individual loom. It was people doing this at ma*s. And in doing that, they were able to create the economies of scale. And, by the way, when this all first started, everyone started saying, oh my gosh. Now that, you know, we can produce so much clothes, no one else will have a job making clothes, and everybody's all screwed, and we'll never have a need for workers again. That isn't what happened. We were able to produce more clothes, and all of a sudden people had other things that they could do. And they went off and they started to create, you know, furniture at scale and dishes at scale and a host of other things where you moved from hand power to machine power. And it led to this industrial revolution, which is the first time we see companies form, and those companies start to gain a lot of power. Because if I'm the person that owns the factory, I got all the weaving looms. I got all the cotton coming in. If you don't wanna work with me, you're out on the streets. And so so, you know, jobs weren't necessarily some people lost their jobs. The people who were doing the hand power. What what what people lost jobs in this first move from nothing to mechanization where there was this 6,000 That's a really good question. I'm not sure that we have a lot of data on specific because I mean, you're you were talking about, you know, 250 years ago, and the records we have even going back to the 19 fifties aren't great. Right? We really start to get good labor statistics in the 19 sixties and moving forward. But there's a general sense that whether it's more industrial farming. Oh, well, now farmers don't have jobs as farmers. They, you know, instead of one person working an acre of land, you could have one person working 50 acres of land. Well, in theory, then 49 people lost their job. So it's things of that nature that we think about, but that was the very early stages, and workers were abused. I mean, look, you may remember the stories and your listeners may remember the stories from from high school about the Triangle Factory fire around, the the Pullman Strikes, Or you may not remember stories around the Ludlow Massacre or the Battle of Blair Mountain. But given their names, you can guess how those turned out for workers. I mean, this is literally people being killed by companies because they're trying to demand a better working condition. And so so, so mechanization, it's fascinating. I didn't know it increased productivity by 6000%, but this kind of started the trend of work evolving and at the same time increasing productivity massively. So what what were some of the things we learned from this mechanization era? What happened next? You know, what's so you you call it, you know, electrification, and then there was, computerization. What's, what's going on? I would say the things that we learn most from the agent mechanization is that there can't be that much of an imbalance for that long. You can have a situation where there is such a power imbalance where companies have so much power over workers, it doesn't persist because it did persist for a long time in the industrial revolution. This is a long time where companies are able to do basically whatever they want. It it is terrible for society, and it leads to a lot of instability. In in Europe, this was time literally of revolution, James. I mean, governments were overthrown because of these things. And as we evolve into electrification and then computerization, we see the pattern repeat where new technologies come on stream, the ability to have electric electricity come into those machines and power them. We see that happen and huge amounts of power come to workers. But at this point, the counterbalancing forces are starting to rise. Regulation, the social safety net, and unions that are able to give workers some semblance some semblance of power in that relationship. It never gets to even. Let's not ever pretend we're going for even. That's not happening. But it's some semblance of power, and it allows companies to be able to start treating workers differently and acting different. Now let let me ask this. This sounds like this idea that, increases in productivity, I I I feel the way you're describing this has and this is not necessarily bad or good. I'm just curious. Has kind of Marxist, overtones or under you know, there's there's there's something Marxist here. The idea that, owners are able to accumulate more capital, and that's leading to essentially class revolution of of some sort. If left unchecked, yeah. If left unchecked, I I I don't doubt, and I think history would show us that if left unchecked, workers at some point say this is enough. I mean, I'm not a Marxist, but, you know, throw off your chains. Like, this is these these are things that can't persist. And whether it's Marxism or populism or nationalism, those tend to be the outshoots because, look, if I'm a worker and I have no hope of advancing, if I am treated terribly every single day, if I can't make enough to really put food on the table, what do you expect that person to do? Just sit and toil for the rest of their lives? Of course, they're going to rise up. Now we hope that rise up would be at the ballot box. We hope that rise up would be joining a union or something else like that. But history would tell us that sometimes that person rises up, and it leads to the Battle of Blair Mountain or the Ludlow Massacre, where workers have said enough. We're not we're not living like this. It's not fair. So so after mechanization, there was computer, after mechanization, there was electrification, and we saw this I mean, the classic example is we went from the horse and buggy to the car. Mhmm. And, and and also another classic example and the and the reason I'm bringing these up, I wanna ask about them. Another classic example is we went from, using always tellers at the bank to sometimes using and often using an ATM machine, and there's many examples like this. And every time there was some wonder that workers' jobs would be lost, you know, like, what's gonna happen to all the people who work on horses? They're not gonna have a job. And yet there always seems to be some you know, they they end up working in the car industry or with ATMs. What's gonna happen to all the bank tellers? Well, ATMs increase profits so much that, banks added to the number of branches they had, so they had to actually hire more tellers. So what's is it the case has have things evolved in in in terms of as these generations of work evolve, do we do we see, naturally, jobs replace the old jobs? The short answer to that question is yes. So history would tell us that every single time people get very upset and say, oh my god. All the jobs are gonna go. And there's a period of transition, which is difficult, and we end up in a spot where there are more jobs at a higher standard of living with workers working fewer hours. That those data patterns are incredibly clear throughout history. Now to double click on the example of the ATM, and it is one of my favorite examples. I talk about it in the book. At the time of the AP ATM's proliferation, 1995, the ATM was named in every bank branch. And to your point, right, it's it's in its name. It's called the automated teller machine. It's automating the job of the teller. Everyone said the 500,000 bank tellers that exist in the United States today, every predictor in the future of work said, oh my god. All those people's jobs are gonna go. And you are correct. We ended up with, 25 years later, 600,000 bank tellers employed in the United States. And I wouldn't point just to bank profits, which is certainly a big variable in this equation. I would SimpliSafe that anybody that draws a very simple conclusion, this is kind of the point of the book, is anybody that draws a simple conclusion, oh, this new technology exists, therefore, all those jobs are gonna go. It belays the complexity that really goes into labor resource planning. There is no, you know, CHRO. There's no c suite of executives that say, oh, that tech exists. Get rid of all of our workers that do that. That's that's not how labor resource planning happens. There are a lot of variables in that equation around that technology, around customer service, around the competitive environment. Because let me tell you something. If I walk into a Chase branch and I've got someone giving me a lollipop and I walk into a Citibank and there's no one there to greet me, there's just a bunch of machines, I like lollipops, James. I'm gonna go back to Chase. I'm not going to Citi, and then Citi is gonna lose customers. So it involves so many things that when people make the statement, oh, well, this technology exists, those jobs are gonna go. I'm not saying it's never true. I'm just saying it belays a lot of complexity that goes into this, and people need to be a lot more thoughtful. They need to study history. They need to study the data. They need to understand how companies actually engage workers, then we can make a conclusion about what may happen to jobs knowing that that's the best shot we got and we still might be wrong. Computerization, I don't know what was the increase in productivity. Maybe you know for between electrification and the era of computerization, which, let's say, started in the sixties and it vastly sped up in the seventies eighties. So the short answer is is I I we don't have it because there are too many job functions at this point to get to so simplistic analysis as we could do in mechanization. Oh, my analysis is is simplistic. I love a good simplistic analysis. When you start thinking about productivity increases in the advent of computers, you're talking about 1,000 and 1,000, tens of 1,000 of different functions. So it's very difficult to come to in a broad societal statement versus textile industry 600x. So so long that's the the short answer is is we don't know. It it it's a lot, but it's not 600 x. And and what happened then? Did we what happened to the economy? Because it seem it feels like the current era I and I think this is your point. Is that the current era is somehow different than all these mechanization, electrification, computerization, and even the Internetization. I'll I'll add one more error. I'll divide up computerization because because that increased productivity too, the rise of people using the web, the the Internet. Of course. Of course. Of course. So, you know, there's a lot to be learned from those those different eras, and there are lessons to be applied. I'm not so sure that it's going to be that different. I would argue that there are things that make it different, the global nature of the change, the speed at which the change is gonna occur. I mean, look. The industrial revolution, the first one, took a 150 years to play out. This is gonna take 20. Yeah. And so it is something to be very mindful of. But what I'm not concerned about is robots taking all of our jobs. That is not something I'm concerned about. We can double click on that in a moment if you'd like. My concern is that while there are gonna be a tremendous number of jobs lost, there are gonna be even more jobs gained. And are we gonna be good at something we have never been good at, which is taking the workers that are being left behind whose jobs, whose industries, whose functions are no longer necessary and moving them into those high growth jobs that are being created, are we gonna do a good job of that? Because we haven't in the past, and that to me is the big challenge is this retraining challenge. And and why is the retraining the the happening necessary now as opposed to these earlier eras? Well, look, retraining has always been an area that has been very important to the world of work. It's just in these eras, you have huge productivity increases because of a big change in technology, electrification, mechanization, computerization, or robots and AI, and that leads to very acute periods of tremendous job loss. And so you just see these blips as the new technologies not just come on stream, but get fully adopted. You see tremendous job losses by certain functions and versus just the normal job losses you see through an economic cycle. That technological change creates all these job losses, and therefore, retraining becomes a much more acute need at that point in time. Right. So, you know, this is similar to I I had this discussion with Andrew Yang where he made you know? And I was making a very similar point to you. Like, Andrew Yang's big example, it but but he countered it, because I've been asking I I've been writing that this was something that he he had an address, but he addressed it very well when I when I spoke with him about it. His big example is truck drivers. Right? So there's 3,000,000 truck drivers. And, if there's self driving trucks on highways, these 3,000,000 truck drivers, they're not really trained to do anything else, and they're not going to want to be trained for anything else. They they just you know, his point was many of them just can't be trained for anything else. And, you know, which maybe is an exaggeration, maybe not. But, you know, and and he he suggested that this if this happens in many industries, you're gonna have millions and millions of jobs lost, and you could have, you know, economic chaos. You could have societal chaos, political chaos. And then and my point was is that look. Just like these other times, there will be new jobs to replace the the you know, to help these truck drivers find new opportunities. So for instance, because there's gonna be you won't need truck drivers, you won't need humans, and self driving cars could drive themselves. You'll have actually many more products being shipped, you know, domestically from from location to location, and that will lead to more, jobs processing, you know, the you know, all these new products entering the supply chain. It'll it'll lead to more jobs. It'll lead to more driving jobs, driving the last mile when you're when the, self driving, cars are are off the highways, so more people need to drive the last mile. And but but he made the interesting point was maybe. Like, maybe that will start right away that all of us like you just said, it's not that all of a sudden, everybody says, okay. Now this has happened. So now we need to get 50,000 new jobs. People have to figure this out. And so he he makes the same point as you, which is that, we don't know. Well, sometimes it might coordinate just right, and sometimes there might be massive losses of jobs. Okay. So I got a lot of things to say here. First is huge fan of Andrew and and and everything he's done and and his work. I would first challenge the self driving trucks being on the road anytime soon. The complexity of the AI engines necessary to do a self driving truck, we've gotten to, like, 90% good. 90% of the cases, the truck can do what it needs to do. And people make the mistake of thinking that the math is linear, saying, oh, well, it took us, you know, 10 years to get to 90%, so it's only another 2 or 3 years. But the math becomes nonlinear when you get past 90%. It starts increasing logarithmically because those edge cases of getting that truck on the road become so incredibly complex that we've been stuck at 90% for, like, 5 years. And we're gonna be stuck at 90%, I would argue, for a long time. And I'll tell you this, the first time one of those trucks hits somebody, the whole industry is gonna stop for a very long time. And so whether the technology gets road ready is a question in and of itself. Whether this technology gets regulatory approval is a question of itself. Whether the technology is gonna require a series of sensors all around the roads everywhere. Like, there are so many infrastructure and regulatory and technology questions that I would challenge the heck out of the if in the near term. And when I say near term terms, I mean the next 20 years before you see those people lose their jobs. And then to my earlier point, just because the truck can do it by itself, doesn't mean all those jobs go away at all. Right? And so we have those two things to contend with. I would agree with him on the want to be retrained. He may you know, in in in your statement, you say Andrew said, well, I don't know if those truck drivers wanna be retrained. Well, a, I I think I have a little more faith in in the drivers that they wanna be retrained and they want a good job and things like that, which I I don't think Andrew would disagree with. So I don't mean to be pejorative. But no. I think I think his point was more that it's not like a truck driver is gonna be retrained to be a computer programmer. Right. So And if those are the if those are the the skills needed, we we don't know what the minimum skills needed will be in an an era where everything is, you know, in in I would call it the AI and automated and robotics error. I would say that we will have tremendous job growth in a number of fields. AI and computer science and blockchain and blah blah blah blah blah will all grow, but so will a lot of other spaces around health care, around sales, marketing, creative industries, and things like that. So the notion that you can't turn the truck driver into a computer programmer, a little too simplistic. There tens of millions of jobs being grown in other areas than besides computer programming. I would also say that the there has been a big issue. We think about the 8,000,000 workers in the United States that lost their jobs from automation in the manufacturing sector, studies have told us that a big issue is, to Andrew's point, actually, they don't want to be retrained. And as much as they don't wanna go back to school, they feel like this is what I was supposed to do, and there's a hesitancy. But then I think about new training technologies coming on stream, VR headsets that are gamified that not only compress the amount of time, but the amount of money it takes to go and get those skills. And those skills could be in high-tech manufacturing or other kinds of industries that maybe someone that was a trucker would be more amenable to, or they could be in health care or a host of other things. So I I think that there's a a hope there, but I would also, by the way, point out that right now in the United States, there's a shortage of truck drivers. Right? We are suffering from a shortage of truck drivers in that industry. The 3,000,000 is the correct number of professional drivers, not truck drivers, but professional drivers in the United States. And there is a shortage of people in the truck driving industry. Right. So I guess his point there, though, was it sometimes is not as easily coordinated as it seems. The transition from some people are not gonna have jobs, and then suddenly, they magically get trained, and they have they have the jobs. And it's always a surprise. Like, what's gonna happen to all the phone workers when everybody just uses Skype? They'll be out of work. Well, magically, they're all I'm in violent agreement with that. And I will say that I think one of the bigger challenges here is that it's not clear who owns this problem. Who owns the retraining? And, a, of course, it doesn't just magically happen, but it's also it doesn't magically happen that all the jobs disappear. There is a short period of time, but that period of time could be 5 to 10 years. So the second a self driving truck is fully perfect, it's a 100% safe, and it's perfectly fine to go on the road, it will not be that the next day every single truck driver is out of a job. It would take 5 years for the companies to buy all the trucks, to transition systems, and to do a bunch of things. So let's be clear about that too. But the idea of who owns this retraining, does the worker own it? Is it on me if I lost my job as a trucker to own my own retraining? Does the education system own this issue? Should they have retrained me, and should I be able to go back to my high school and get retrained or a secondary school, or does the government own it? Right? And what role does the government play? Do they force the trucking company to give me the retraining? It's unclear. If I were to answer that, and I'm curious, of course, of your answer, but I would history kind of shows that it's the employee's responsibility. Look at this economic lockdown for instance. No matter what incentives were put in place for companies to keep their employees, 55,000,000 people ended up filing for unemployment. The government didn't give a s**t. Corporations weren't loyal, and this is to your point in the book that, you know, the lifelong employment contract is done now. And, you know, that was part of your your history. And so I would argue that no matter what anybody says about policy being involved or we should make policy for this, ultimately, the employee is gonna have to take responsibility for their career. I will now be in violent agreement with you on that. I think that has been a very powerful very powerful and very clear trend in the world of work today is increased personal responsibility, Whether it's for your training, development, your retirement, your health care, the marketing of your skills, at the end of the day, the employee owns it. And if anybody thinks anything differently, you're smoking something. Yeah. It's it's interesting in your history to think out why did the lifetime employment contract exist because I think that's interesting as well. So so for a 100 years, basically, all through the 20th century, it was assumed you'd start work at a company, and you'd work there till you retire, and you get the gold watch. And that era is, like, almost laughable now. Like, it's it just doesn't happen. I would actually argue, James, that it didn't really exist. Now did it exist for some workers at some companies? A 100%. Did people give actually give gold watches after 30, 40 years of service? Absolutely. Pepsi, by the way, is the first company to ever be recorded as a way of giving a gold watch. One of those things you get to learn while researching for 7 years on a book about the future of work, is that Pepsi was the first company. So look. Didn't it exist for some workers at some companies completely? But the average amount of time a person spends in a job today is 4.2 years. It's the average amount for a worker in the United States. In 1960, at the height of the lifetime employment model, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping data on the average amount of time someone spent a job, it was 5 years. And so when I ask people the question, what do you think it is before, obviously, I I tell them the answer, people say, oh, it's probably it was probably 15, 20, 30 years was the average. No. It was 5. And the reason that it was 5 is because the lifetime employment model, while it existed for some companies and some workers of those companies, that was not the reality for every worker in the United States of America. It's this idealized notion that we like to think about, but that is not the reality for most workers at any point in history that we have data on. Right? And, again, I'm not saying anything about I shouldn't draw too many conclusions. All I can tell you is that's what the data tells me is that it was 5 years, which is to say for some people at some company, sure, but not for everybody. Okay. But there were some put let's let's put it a different way then. There were many industries where the lifetime employment contract was sort of in place. Completely. Whether it was because of unions or because of the needs of the companies, they didn't wanna have to, you know, go through massive training of employees and then retrain new ones when when there was employee churn. So so companies like the phone company, you know, put in place, you know, pensions. So if you stayed there for 30 years, you would get you would retire with a pension. So there was incentives for people to, stay at the same company for a long time. And those incentives for in those industries are now going away. There's not really such thing as as pensions. Unions have declined. And in part, everybody was cool with this because, you know, technology was changing things so fast. There would be more opportunities for people to switch jobs fast. There's more mobility of workers so they could move from one part of the country to another. They weren't stuck in one town, you know, one corporate town. And, companies no longer, you know, needed to keep people as as much. There wasn't as much incentive to to hold on to people. There were and I do address this in the book even though I make the statement that I think the lifetime employment model was more of a notion than an actual practice, again, for all workers. But there were 3 things that definitively collapsed it because you're completely correct. Look. We went from a defined benefit pension plan to a defined contribution pension plan to a 401 k. And while there are still some of the first two, most people at this point have a 401 k. And so companies aren't making that commitment and through retirement. And I would argue there were 3 things that conspired to completely kill whatever notion we had of lifetime employment. One was globalization. All of a sudden, the American worker is now competing with workers all around the world, and these are workers that didn't get the same rights, that don't companies that operate in entirely different regulatory frameworks, entirely different cost structures. So globalization clearly created the need for American companies to adapt and not be able to afford a lifetime commitment to the employees that they made it to. 2nd was shareholder capitalism. The idea that managers now are being paid based on the next quarter's bonus, and their incentive structure is very different. And now we see huge income gaps start to to blow up. And the third reason is the beginning of automation. People like to talk about robots and AI just coming on stream now. The first robots started to appear in the late 19 seventies, early 19 eighties in industrial manufacturing. And so people can talk about, you know, the mech you know, factories being moved to Mexico or moved to China. Most of the manufacturing employment in the United States, we peaked at 20,000,000 in 1980. We went down over the next 20 years to 12,000,000, and we stayed actually pretty stable at 12,000,000 in people employed in manufacturing. Most of those jobs were lost due to automation, and those were the kinds of companies, by the way, that were very good in the lifetime employment construct. The General Motors worker that would work on the line for 30 to 40 years, That job was being displaced, not by necessarily the worker in China, but that job was being displaced by the robot that could now do that function. Where did people go when this loss of jobs started to happen? Before the lockdowns, US employment was at an all time high, actually. The number of people in the in the labor force was at an all time high. Where do people disappear to when they when they lose these lifetime jobs? So the short answer is there are a host of places. Sometimes we see blips in the education system, and we see people go back to work. We actually saw that during, the right after the great recession, global financial crisis. We also see increases in long term disability roles. There were about a 1000000 people added to the long term disability roles after the global financial crisis. How does that happen? Like, did they have to get sick, or were they were they sick and previously not filing for disability, and now they figured, okay. Well, now I might as well file for disability? It's a very fair question why the disability roles increased by 1,000,000 people. I would argue that there are some people that it was very justified, and I'm sure there are a lot of people that just said, oh, this is a way for me to just do nothing. Right. I I hope that's not the case, but I I would understand that point of view. Were there other things that people become solopreneurs? Or People then did move jobs. There is a kind of general myth that there are more freelancers or more small businesses or things like that in the United States. The data, again, doesn't support that. The number of people that, are considered their own boss went from 6% of the labor force in 1990 down to 5% of the labor force today, but we did see a lot of people move to new jobs. And so there are long term unemployed. There are short term unemployed. Above the long term unemployed, we have the people in long term disability. All of those things did increase. And so while the unemployment rate was certainly at a very low level, the labor force participation rate has never recovered to where we were at the global financial crisis. In the global financial crisis, 66% of the people in the United States that could work were working. Today, 63%, pre COVID. 63% of people were working. So we never recovered to where we fully were. And and I wouldn't quite, blame it on the financial crisis. I mean, I think some of it is due to the fact that bandwidth started increasing very fast, and you you you talk about this in your book where remote work started happening and and companies were a lot more productive. So, but, again, like, if the labor for so you're so you're saying the labor force participation rate went down, and I asked, you know, where did people go? Are they just sitting at home watching TV? But you you mentioned so so the answer is maybe, but it it maybe they're more on disability. Maybe they're taking odd jobs that are somehow not in the the labor force. Who knows? I think we had some people go into the education system. We had some people go to long term disability. We had some people stay long term and structurally unemployed, meaning they're not on disability, but they're they're no longer employed. We had some people move to other jobs, which is great, and we had some people retire. And that is 3% of the labor force, which in the United States is 5,000,000 people. And you are a 100% right. The global financial crisis isn't the structural issue, but it did create a nice kind of break in the datasets from kind of pre and post, and you can see very clearly what happens because in times of economic dislocation, like the global financial crisis, like the COVID crisis, you see huge movements in labor statistics, and you're able to kinda start calibrating versus every other time to the point we were making earlier. Things move very slowly and very steadily. Right. So these these, crisis points are almost like accelerators because companies essentially have an excuse to fire everyone. And then when the crisis is over, they could recalibrate. They don't have to necessarily hire everyone back. It is a perfectly good and then sometimes necessary reason to make some of the changes you weren't making before. Yeah. Whether it's political cover or societal cover or whatever it is, yes, companies go rip Band Aids off that they have been thinking about for some time. So now we're at this point, the end of jobs. What does that mean to you? So what it means to me is we had a world over the last maybe 100 years that was a world that I would call a one office, one manager, 9 to 5 world. That was the world of work. That's how most people did their work. And we are moving to what I would call a fluid, team based work from anywhere, always on job. And so when I talk about the end of jobs, it's the end of that 9 to 5, one office, one manager job. That job is dying has been dying slowly for 30 years, and COVID has certainly accelerated that change. So, like, what are what are, example jobs that number in the millions that are, you know, are fit under that definition? I think you can look at almost any professional services job, whether that's accountants or lawyers or consultants, financial advisors, whatever it is. It used to be and I'll give you an example of a law firm. I was on the phone with the CHRO of a very large law firm the other day. And she said, you know, silver lining in COVID is I never was able to hire that JD mom. The mom that went to law school, but then had to take time off because she wanted to have a family. Because that woman needed a flexible work arrangement because of her circumstance. And we're just using her as an example. There are obviously many other people that need flexible work examples work arrangements, and her law firm would never hire that person. They would say, no. No. No. No. In order to work at this firm, you have to be here 9 to 5 every day in this office or one of our other locations. That's it. That was the job. Now because of COVID, their c suite has did a 180. They said, wow. I guess everybody doesn't need to be here all the time. We can work remotely. We can kinda do something very, very differently. And that was a big change. And, you know, I have no idea actually offhand how many lawyers are employed in the America. Way too many, I think is the answer. And, the same can be said for accountants. I was on the phone with the head of, well, the 6th or 7th largest accounting firm. They think it's been amazing. They are fundamentally changing the way they work. They're not going all remote. They're just going more flexible and creating more flexible work arrangements because it's become very apparent that you don't need to have everybody in that office 9 to 5. But this does not mean you never see anybody. Doesn't mean you go all remote. They still want people in the office every now and again, but not all the time. And that's that breaking of this structure of 9 to 5 in this office. And are in those industries like law or accounting or or whatever, are jobs also being lost because now they're more productive due to remote work. And, also, there's there's like, take law as an example. There are websites like LegalZoom where I don't need to spend $1,000 for a basic, I don't know, escrow agreement. I can just download it from LegalZoom for 0. So the short answer in regards to remote work is we don't know. And I will tell you anybody that, again, draws too many conclusions and says, oh, because of this, we don't know yet. This is all happening in real time. We'll know in another year what kind of impact it's gonna have on hiring. There's just way too much noise in this data right now. My sense is there won't be jobs lost, that there'll be productivity increases, there'll be profit increases, there'll be revenue increases. This is not historically, I should say, we have not seen companies that do remote work lead to more job losses nor more offshoring, which is a fear that a lot of people have that once you break that bone of well, the person doesn't need to be in this office. Well, can't they just be in India? That we have not really seen. What we see is people stay about 93% of people stay within a commutable distance to that office because you wanna come in every now and again. People are a social animal. They don't wanna just be sitting, you know, off in the wilderness somewhere doing their work. They want to be around the water cooler with their colleagues. As antiquated as that sounds, people want that. They want to be humanly connected to that team in real life. But I don't know. But to your point, I don't think they wanna do that a 100% of the time. Completely. You know what? Once a week is once a week is fine. I love my colleagues. I don't need to see them every day, but I do miss them. And companies also are saving costs now because instead of getting 3 office floors, you can get half an office floor if you're rotating all the people in the office. So there is, I think, 2 tensions here. 1 is around more flexible work arrangements, which means you need to allocate fewer square foot per person because Joe Smith's not coming in that much. Sally Jones isn't coming that much. They can hotel. They can just have a one desk for each of those 3 or 4 people, but that's offset against the dedensifying that is going on in offices right now where because of COVID and then just now a general notion that's gonna be in all of our heads where no one's gonna wanna be sitting cheek to jowl anymore with their colleagues. So anyone that had trading type desks because it wasn't just the Goldman Sachs trading floor. A lot of companies that evolved to that open space, a lot of tech companies, you have people 1 foot from each other, 2 feet from each other. Now they're gonna be not necessarily 6 feet, but they're gonna wanna be 3 or 4 feet from each other. So you're gonna see some dedensifying, and you're certainly gonna see some ability to allocate fewer square foot for all of your employees. So what's the end game here? Like, what you know, your your book, you make predictions about where we're gonna be in in 2040. What worries you? Is there any like, when I first wrote about this concept that that the notion of corporatism was changing, really the fear was is that office buildings were emptying out because jobs, in fact, were being lost. Kind of the Andrew Yang, argument, which, again, we don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no, but it seems like there's gonna be some degree of that or or some switching of industries, and that could take time. Like like like you mentioned, it could be a a slow process. But what's is there something to be afraid of? Someone listening to this, what should they be thinking about? Well, what they should be thinking out obviously depends on what their perspective is on this. As a CEO, what they should be thinking about is have I systematized? Do I understand where all my workers are, what they're all capable of, what their skills are so that I really understand do I have the right skills as the economy continues to shift? If I'm a worker, I wanna be thinking about what are my skills and how monetizable are they and how monetizable will they be in a few years. There is a phrase that a lot of people say, oh, it's overused. I would argue it is not nearly used enough, which is you need to be a lifelong learner. You need to constantly be refreshing those skills. And that goes to the answer to your question, which is what is my biggest fear? When I think about the Skynet scenario, it's not the robots taking our jobs. It's certainly not the robots launching a war on humankind. It is the retraining that we're gonna have to do. I mean, James, when you look at the data and you break down job function by job function over about 800 different job functions, how much of those job functions are susceptible to automation because they involve repetitive high volume processes? And then you look at what happens historically if you have 75 to a 100% of your component tasks or repetitive high volume, 50 to 75%, or 0 to 50%, and you see that historically a job that's 75 to a 100% repetitive high volume tasks, it goes. Boom. It's gonna go as soon as that technology again, when I say as soon, I mean over a 5 year period. 50 to 75%, historically half the jobs in there are displaced, and you end up in a cobot scenario. The robot does the repetitive high volume task as the human eye do a higher volume task. In 0 to 50, you almost see no job losses. Very long explanation to say that when you do that math across all the jobs in society today, you get about 10 to 15% of jobs over the next 20 years are going to go. And that's a lot. Dude, that's a lot. That's 25,000,000 people. Right. So do they get because now industries are making more profits and technology is leading to more opportunities, does it naturally transition to new industries replacing the job, maybe even creating more jobs than we had before? Is that, like, an automatic? Is that a is that a rule of the economy or no? Is it an automatic? No. Is it a highly, highly, highly likely? Yes. I mean, highly likely. I am very confident that more jobs will be created than the 25,000,000 we're gonna lose. Is it possible it's not 30,000,000? It's only 25? Sure. Is it possible it's not 25? Maybe it's 22? Sure. Those are all possible. Is it possible that it's 0? No. That is just it's just not possible. And so the challenge is how do you take those 25,000,000 workers? How do you take that truck driver, and how do you transition them not to be a coder? Everyone doesn't need to be a coder. But how do you transition them to being a health care worker, to being somebody working in a new high-tech manufacturing facility? How do you transition him to being not a full time truck driver, meaning you're not driving the truck, but someone that's cobotting with the truck in case something comes up because you're not gonna want fleets of trucks with no humans anywhere in the loop. How do you train him maybe to sit in a command center to command a fleet of 15 different trucks and be the human in the loop? Those jobs will all get created, and we have to do a good job, at least a better job than we've done historically, and moving those workers into the high paying, or high growth jobs that will get created. But as we mentioned earlier, it's it's not really a we doing this. It's up to the employee to get to to see what's coming and to get the training. Here here's an example. A high a highly skilled example. Take a radiologist. Radiologists, you know, they take their X rays of their patients, and now AI could read the X-ray, and it's just it's it's regulatory. It's regulation that the radiologist has to be the one to actually deliver the news to the patient. But other than for that, let's just say AI can do completely the job. What would a a a guy who's 45 years old, so he's been doing this for 20 years, you know, has huge expenses, you know, paying off medical school loans and medical insurance and all this. What and let's say they don't wanna they wanna be a radiologist. They wanna be a doctor. What are the how do they start thinking about this? And and, again, they're 45, 50 years old, so it's, like, new for them. It's a it's a muscle they haven't exercised changing careers. I would say 2 things. First is, again, it's not going to be just because the AI got perfected, and I would argue if it were perfected or not. It's not that tomorrow no radiologist has a job. Right? It's gonna take some time. Would I sit there as a person knowing that the job of radiology can be fully automated? Do I would I encourage people to be trained as a radiologist right now? Maybe not. But do I sit there and go, oh my god. What are we gonna do with this 45 year old radiologist? I'm like, no. He's gonna continue working as a radiologist probably until he retires. And he might have fewer things to do. He might have better things to do. And as much as, yeah, the AI can do all that, but I'm gonna sit there and really do the complex cases that have multiple different layers and scans. And I'm really gonna focus in on my conversation with the the person about what this means. It is just not the case that because the AI can do it, all radiology jobs immediately get eliminated. So that's all kind of in, you know, point 1. And point 2, there are plenty of things in related medical fields, I'm sure, that'll come up. And I I but I wouldn't pretend to know what those are. And I I it's always challenging to have the conversation about that person because then you start identifying with that person. Look. It is entirely possible. There'll be tens of thousands of radiologists that'll be put out of work that may not have easy things to do. Yes. That is certainly true. But when we think about it society wide, and this is why, you know, I tend to think about things at that macro level because I don't wanna think about the individual people. That's heartbreaking. I don't wanna think about the family in the Midwest. That's I I I wish I had better solutions, and it's no solace to somebody who lives in a town where a factory closed that society is better off. They don't care. They care about the factory that was lost in their town. But as a society, we will end up with a higher standard of living, working fewer hours with more jobs. And just to go back to the question you asked, why do I say we have to do a better job? I would argue that it is in everybody's interest that we do a good job with this, and government has an important role to play. Now whether that is creating the tax incentives for me as an individual to do the retraining, whether it is mandating companies do the retraining if they're doing a riff, they're letting people go, you have to provide x number of dollars in retraining, Whether it is creating the environment where the education system is not so laser focused on the 4 year college for everybody, but more focused on vocational schools or technical schools, whether it is creating a high school program or track as they do in other countries for people that are going into vocations. Those are a lot of things that could be done. I don't sit there and say the 45 year old, radiologist should go and be an electrician even though we have a shortage of electricians in this country. So there are a host of things to do, and it it's difficult to have the debate on the individual level because, a, it gets emotional, and, b, I don't really know what a radiologist could do. I don't know the shoulder industries or what he or she could do. So so what's the role of kind of these, you know, be it's so easy now to set up a company and buy things from one website, sell things via another website, or sell services through the Internet. Like, the Internet has made smaller the universe in terms of, like, if I have a service to offer or a product to sell, it's much easier for me to find the people who could buy that service or product. So that's created my kid, for instance, sells clothes that she buys in flea markets. She sells them on Depop on the Internet or Poshmark or Etsy or whatever. So so there's a there's the rise of the kind of Internet entrepreneur. What kind of role does this play in in your scenario? I think it plays a vital role in this context. Did you think 10 years ago that that would be an opportunity that that your your child would be able to do? Was that something you were like, hey. Maybe when, you know, she's the Sage, she'll do some of this. To be honest, for me, I did. But but not everybody. Not everybody did. Just because I was in the business. I was already doing it myself. Fair point. Fair point. But for most people, no one thought that was a thing, and this is where this your example is so powerful is that in 10 years, there will be a 1000000 people employed in something that none of us could sit here and theorize about right now. Right. Maybe we could theorize it in the abstract, but, you know, we have no idea. And this is what happens throughout human history is that there are jobs created in fields that nobody thought was a thing. 20 years ago, if I had told you there are a 1000000 people that that are gonna be employed in social media marketing, you'd be like, what the heck is you wouldn't. But most people would be like, what the heck is that? Right. It's a thing that employs a 1000000 people now. So your book, you outline the history. You outline the reasons how why the lifetime job has has changed or at least the dynamics of it. You analyze the different shifts in history that led to massive increases of productivity and then structural changes in the nature of jobs. Maybe you could summarize your final conclusions about what's gonna happen next and not the CEO, but how should the the average worker who might be worried about this, what can they what can they think? What keep what what scares you? Well, aside from the retraining point, which to me is the biggest scary thing, I think that our near term future plays out like this. We're gonna go through a period of continued dislocation, and we will see the rise of these counterbalancing forces. We'll see an increase in the regulatory state. We'll see an increase in the union movement. I can double click on that in a moment if you want. We'll see changes to the social safety net. Those are our counterbalancing forces that help workers out, and we will end up with ever more jobs at a higher standard of living with the average amount of time a person works continuing to decrease. That will happen. What scares me is the transition point from a to b. And if we handle this retraining right because if we don't, people get disaffected. And in our country, they don't revolt and riot the way it has happened in the past in other countries, but they'll vote for candidates that are very redistributive, that are very nationalistic, and a host of things that history would tell us are very dangerous. Now all that's on a societal level. What I would say to an individual is go hard. Go hard tech or go hard human. When we look at the types of jobs that are projected to grow over the next 10 to 15 years, they are certainly all the jobs in STEM that we know of. Right? Like, shocking nobody, computer science jobs, and blockchain and cybersecurity and all those other jobs, and robots, and AI. Those jobs are gonna grow tremendously. Great. But so are jobs in hard human. There is a huge overestimation as to what AI systems and robots can do. People think, oh, I'm gonna have a Rosie Jessen type thing in my home in 10 years. No. You will not. That is laughable if anybody thinks that's not gonna happen. Nowhere even close. Right? But and the same thing is true about what an AI oh, every time I call someone, I'm gonna get an AI system. No. You will not. You are going to talk to a human. And so jobs in customer service, jobs in sales and marketing and health care, jobs in design and creativity, AI systems are nowhere near capable of doing the types of things that humans do. They will do some of those functions. They'll take the repetitive high volume tasks, but they're not gonna do that human to human interaction anytime in the near future. And those jobs are also projected to grow. And I will say, I think the most intelligent analysis on this, and if you're gonna read one thing on the future of work well, if you're gonna read one thing, you should read my book. But if you're gonna read 2 things, you should read the World Economic Forum's report on the future of work they published now in 2018, and it goes very in-depth into job functions and why they're growing and in which regions. And I think it's it's just brilliant, and and reading that report is what gave me the go hard conclusion. Now what happens we were talking a little about New York City where we're we're from, you know, before this pandemic. What happens to cities when more people go remote, more people could live wherever they want? Like, what else societally changes in this next wave of automation or this next wave of job change? It is such a great question. I would say I don't know that I wanna be long office space right now, but I don't think office space is so massively impacted. But on the margin, is it impacted? Absolutely. Absolutely on the margin. So there will be on the margin less need for office space, but not no need. Right? People will still do it. There when I think about remote work, I think about the 3% of the US workforce that work remotely pre pandemic, and that had grown a 100% over the 10 years prior to the pandemic. And then I think about all the data on the world of work now pointing to that 3% going to about 8%. And it's important to be definitional here. Remote work means that more than 50% of the time you're not in that office. And if you ask me remote work or flexible work, I would say another 25% will work in a remote in a flexible work context, meaning they're going in 2 days a week or 3 or 4 days a week or, you know, taking every other week off. They're there more than 50% of the time, which has important implications from a tax nexus standpoint and from as we talked about earlier, an office space square footage. And then I think about the fact that 93% of workers that work remote still live within a commutable distance. So we're not we might you know, I could work remote right from my apartment even though my office is 2 blocks away. The last thing I would say on this, and I appreciate I've rambled a bit here, is history would tell us that any bet against cities is a fool's bet. We could look at London during the, the 1918 pandemic or before then, And the population of London dipped down. Everyone's like, oh, it's the end of London as the global city. Nope. Bounced right back. So I would not make a bet against New York City. That would be a poor bet historically. But there's never been a a remote work environment like this before. You are correct. This time, you know, it's it but I would counter I would counter with my favorite lesson from business school, which is the 5 most dangerous words in business are this time it is different. It is entirely possible, James. All I can do is look at history and look at data. The data is not great right now, but history would tell us that things will bounce back. But you are correct. The appeal of cities is this agglomeration of people and resources and all these things. And if we don't need those to be productive, then is my reason to be here because I love going to Broadway? Maybe. Is my reason to be here because I love to watch the Knicks lose? Maybe. I mean, I do enjoy both of those things. Now you you sold your your company, to ADP. Are you still with the with the and and and your company was on this topic, basically. Like, it made you an expert on this topic. Are you still at ADP? Are you still with the company? I love ADP. I love everything about ADP. They provided for me and my family for, you know, generations, and I I will always love them. I gave my word that I would stay for a period of time post acquisition, and 2 months ago, that that period ended. And so What are you gonna what are you gonna do now? I don't know is the short answer. I'm gonna take my 1st break in about 20 years. The work market was my 4th start up, so I'm gonna take some time. I'm thinking about a potential run for office. I'm thinking about starting a nonprofit, Thinking about starting another company. There are a host of things that I am so incredibly grateful and blessed that I have the opportunity to just sit and think about for a while, and so I'll cogitate and write some plans. What what office are you considering? You know, I had a thesis that I haven't spoken about publicly. I'm gonna talk we're gonna talk about it for the first time here. I had a thesis that I would run, and I actually was very close to launching this, to run for the United States senate as a Republican in 2022 against Chuck Schumer. And I think Chuck Schumer has done a great job as a senator. I think he's done a great job for the people of the state of New York. I think that I would do a better job, and I think I have a very different point of view on a number of issues. But I'm not running because, oh, Chuck Schumer's terrible, and I would run a campaign that was respectful and thoughtful. And that was the number one reason I was gonna run. The other is that I would be a one issue candidate, and my one issue is electoral reform. James, I I don't know what the right answers are on tax policy, on environmental policy, on, you know, foreign policy. I've got ideas, but I don't pretend to know the answer. But here's what I'm sure of. I am sure that the people we're putting into the room right now to come up with the answers aren't doing it, and they're not doing it because we're putting them in the room with the wrong incentives. And so I would run entirely to change a political class, and I would support open primaries, nonpartisan primaries, rank choice voting, term limits, mandatory voting. Those are the kinds of things that to me Mandatory voting. Process. Yes. I don't I I was loving everything you were saying until mandatory voting. Everyone's gotta vote. What what if someone's not, doesn't wanna vote because they don't they they don't know. Yeah. They don't know the issues. And, also, mandatory voting, wouldn't that in general favor incumbents? It is entirely possible that it could favor incumbents. I don't think that the countries that have mandatory voting like Australia, I don't think we've seen that historically. But I will say when I mentioned it to friends in Australia, they're like, oh, no. That's not a good idea because I have friends that just go, oh my god. I have to vote. I don't know who to vote for, and they run-in. You can certainly have a category in there saying, I don't know. I don't know. I'd love to see I don't know because you know who really won the presidential election, by the way? Joe Biden got 79,000,000 votes. Donald Trump got 73,000,000 votes. You know who really won? Apathy won. Apathy got a 100,000,000 votes. There were 100,000,000 Americans that could have voted that didn't, and that, I will never be okay with that. And I appreciate the argument that people should be educated, but then may I I would counter with how educated do you think a lot of those people that voted actually were? Not so sure that they were that educated. Yeah. No. I agree with that. So so but, look, I can't agree with every issue of every candidate, so I agree I agreed with 95% of your issues. So and the mandatory voting will will not happen constitutionally because it's a right and not an obligation. Yeah. But other than that, I'll support your candidacy. And I appreciate it. And Jeff Jeff Wald, author of the end of jobs, I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. This is a a a very important issue. This is an issue that I've also written about quite a bit, but not in as, you you write about it incredibly intelligently and with a lot of experience. And, thanks once again for for coming on the podcast. I I appreciate it. This was such an honor. So enjoyable. You clearly know a lot about this topic, and so this was super, super fun. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks, Jeff.