I want to talk about a conversation that's a little forward-looking, but it's coming
quick.
We've been talking about this before, but this is this rapid rollout of artificial intelligence.
And just to see if context, we came out of the COVID pandemic and AI was dropped in our
lap.
Coincidence?
Who knows?
Maybe history will show that, but it's dropped in our lap and all of a sudden it's aggressively
accelerating into every aspect of our life.
And we as citizens are going around, looking around, going, wait a minute, this thing's
moving really fast.
We've got to have some big conversations here.
One of them is about jobs, employment, and universal basic income.
And an interesting point, Yvon Noel Harari, he is a historian.
He's also really likes the WEF.
He had a point that I want to really spotlight here.
Take a listen.
Now you can think about the AI revolution as simply a wave of immigration of millions
and billions of AI immigrants that will take people's jobs that have very different cultural
ideas and that might try to gain some kind of political power.
And these AI immigrants, these digital immigrants, they don't need visas.
They don't cross the sea in some rickety boat in the middle of the night.
They come at the speed of light.
And I look, for instance, at far-right parties in Europe, and they talk so much about the human
immigrants, sometimes with justification, sometimes without justification.
They don't talk almost at all about the wave of digital immigrants that is coming into
Europe.
And I think they should be much, if they care about the sovereignty of their country,
if they care about the economic and cultural future of their country, they should be far
more worried about the digital immigrants than about the human immigrants.
I mean, it's a good point, right, like focus on the real issue.
And it's a trippy thought, right, that for all the immigration and what it can do to jobs,
what if it's millions of immigrants that I think you could argue have the intelligence
of a nil-bill laureate and are going to work for less than minimum wage?
And yet, we're just all looking and complaining about other issues.
And this one is, as he says, moving at light speed right now.
Absolutely.
And I want to read something that puts a fine point on it.
In fact, I read this, and it really stopped me in my place.
So this is an article called The Great Decoupling.
And the title is White Collar Displacement Ignites 2026, UBI Firestorm.
It says that the United States enters 2026.
The long-predicted AI revolution has transitioned from a Silicon Valley slogan
to a disruptive economic reality.
For decades, automation was a specter haunting factory floors and warehouses,
but the last 18 months have seen a dramatic shift towards the white collar cliff.
This displacement has catapulted universal-based income
from the fringe libertarian experiment to the center of its 2026 political agenda.
It goes on to say that significance of this moment cannot be overstated.
Unlike previous waves of automation that replaced physical tasks,
the current egentic era of AI targets the core of the middle-class professional identity,
cognitive reasoning, and project management, and specialized knowledge.
As corporate earnings reach record highs due to AI-driven operational efficiency,
while entry-level professional hiring has plummeted by nearly 40% in some sectors,
the debate over who owns the wealth generated by artificial intelligence
has become the defining issue of the year.
So as we are given AI to transcribe our Zoom calls and make some better meme images
with Google Gemini, corporations are using it to vastly accelerate their efficiency
and thus take people out of the job market.
So the question is, are we stumbling into a universal-based income?
And we have the State of the Union address that's going to be on February 24th
by President Trump, and a lot of people are looking forward to that
and saying, is there going to be conversation about an AI dividend
or something that's going to be given to the public, some kind of stipend or something
because of this job displacement?
And that would really be the first specter of this universal-based income we're seeing.
And again, I'm going to point to Florida here because we have a lot of governors
and people that are standing up in politics and wanting a different change here.
This is Governor DeSantis in Florida.
He says, he took the X. He said, why would people want to allow
the human experience to be displaced by computers?
As a creation of man, AI will not be divorced from the flaws of human nature.
Indeed, it is more likely to magnify those flaws.
It is dangerous.
This issue, I think, is going to become, you know,
a more and more major topic on the high wire because it's concerning me.
I have a son that's 17 years old.
He's a junior in high school.
My daughter's 11 years old.
And I'm trying to imagine what the future looks like for them.
I'm trying to imagine, am I in the same position to guide my children forward
for their careers and their ideas of who and what they want to be?
Am I in the same position my parents were at?
Because, you know, my son talks about, you know, perhaps being a lawyer.
And what freaks me out is really, I imagine there will still be lawyers
standing on floors of courtrooms, at least for, you know, the near future.
But what about all the researchers?
What about all the entry-level jobs coming in paralegals?
Or all the work that you could do?
You know, whether it's an internship, why is any lawyer going to bring on
an intern to research other cases?
Can you do some case studies on me?
When AI is going to do that better than anyone can imagine.
You know, why is anyone, how much of medicine is going to get wiped out?
If your child wants to be a doctor, if the doctors mostly have become,
you know, essentially agents for the pharmaceutical industry,
almost virtually, you know, how much of the medical profession is just,
here's the drug for that problem.
Here's the drug for your reaction to that drug for that problem.
Oh, you have another problem. Here's the three drugs.
And we know that's what's going on.
AI can do that way better.
It certainly, as well as any doctor, that job's gone.
So to your point, all of these, what used to be what you wanted
your child to go to school for, they seem to be the one,
those careers are almost in the firing line more than a plumber,
more than an auto mechanic at the moment.
I know Elon's working on some robots to do that stuff.
I don't know how far down the line, but I'm in a quandary right now
on, you know, what is it I want my child to be good at?
Right now, I'm like, you just better be good at surviving,
being creative, being able to think outside the box to bob and weave
because your world is about to be decimated.
And then you think about universal basic income.
Let's just take away the greatest motivating factor all of us had
that got us off of our bed, whether it was in college or after college
or going out to get a job and that's survival.
You know, survival is what kept me alive in New York when I was,
you know, trying to get that job waiting tables while I was
pursuing a career in the arts, simply having to survive.
That was taken away.
How many people lose really the will to fight or live?
How much of the society will be what smoking weed and playing
video games?
And I guess the great overlords will keep voting for them to
get a raise to do that.
More UBI for the people that aren't working.
I don't buy it.
Yeah.
And what's it replaced by?
That's the question.
What's replaced?
What replaces that drive if in the monetary system is not
perfect, but I think you and I both agree on that.
But what replaces that drive?
Is it creativity?
Is it some type of blissful life?
Or is it more of a dependence on who's giving out the UBI,
which is most likely going to be the government?
And that's a recipe for disaster as we've seen throughout history.
Well, Jeffrey, I appreciate the reporting.
Fantastic work.
Again, I think this is going to be a super interesting year.
So many things are moving really, really fast.
And I love that you're just, you know, keeping it all.
I, you know, I in front of us, let's not worry, you know,
yeah, immigration, but what if immigration is coming light
speed and it's coming after all of our jobs in a different
form?
We've got to keep our eyes on all of that.