In this episode of Career Club Live, host Bob Goodwin interviews Jeff Wald. Jeff discusses his entrepreneurial journey and lessons learned from starting multiple successful companies.
He also shares insights from his book "The End of Jobs" and perspectives on the future of work including the impact of technology like AI. Tune in to hear Jeff's predictions on how the world of work will change and advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.
In this episode of Career Club Live, host Bob Goodwin interviews Jeff Wald. Jeff discusses his entrepreneurial journey and lessons learned from starting multiple successful companies.
He also shares insights from his book "The End of Jobs" and perspectives on the future of work including the impact of technology like AI. Tune in to hear Jeff's predictions on how the world of work will change and advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.
I know you're gonna find it. You've got to keep on at it. Hi everybody, this is Bob Goodwin, and welcome to another episode of Career Club Live. We're so glad that you joined us today. If you're watching us on YouTube, please subscribe, comment. It really does help, as well. As whatever your favorite podcast platform is that you might be listening to us will today, please rate and review. It really does help again. So thank you for doing that. Today's episode is being brought to you by some free resources that we're offering folks on careerclub. You can get things like tips to help you with your networking, answers to hard questions like what's your greatest weakness, as well as maybe the three things that are holding you back in your job search today. So, with all of that, we encourage you to go to careerclub. So thank you for that.
Speaker 1:Today's guest is somebody I've been looking forward to speaking with for a while. He came highly recommended by a mutual friend and his name is Jeff Wald. He's got a very impressive background, so I'm gonna read some of this if you don't mind. So Jeff is the founder of Work Market, an enterprise software platform that enables companies to manage freelancers, and for him good news it was acquired by ADP. But that isn't his first startup. He also had a company called Spinback, which is a social sharing platform, eventually purchased by Salesforcecom.
Speaker 1:So, for any of our aspiring entrepreneurs, pay attention to what Jeff is going to tell you, because he really understands how to do startups and obviously have successful exits. But beyond that, jeff is an active angel investor, startup advisor, as well as serving on numerous public and private boards of directors. A lot of what we're going to be talking about today, though, is he's the author of a couple of books. One is the birthday rules, and second is the end of jobs, which is where we'll spend a lot of our time today. Jeff's a frequent speaker at conferences. He's meeting on startups and other labor issues. So with that, jeff, welcome.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 1:I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 2:I mean, that was a hell of an intro Through me. Yeah, that was great. Thank you so much. Glad to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's awesome. Now. We're genuinely very, very pleased that you would spend a few minutes with us today, so as is our want to do. We always like to do just a handful of icebreakers, so people get to know you as a human being, not just a tech impresario. So easy question when were you born and raised? Where'd?
Speaker 2:you go. I grew up in a town called Port Washington, new York, out in Long Island it is.
Speaker 1:Long Island. Literally Come on.
Speaker 2:It is a Norman Rockwell painting. I mean just a Burby, USA. Kids playing stickball in the streets, American flags flying everywhere. Of the many things I've been blessed with growing up in my family in that town is very high on the list.
Speaker 1:So this is the beautiful part about doing these things. I didn't know that you grew up in Port Washington, so I worked for NPD for a number of years. Npd is located in Port Washington in an old hockey link, which is wild. That may for a weird office setup. But there you go. First things we have in common. Second, where'd you go to school? I didn't bother to read that because I wouldn't give you the opportunities. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:I went undergrad to Cornell University and then I had my first grad degree from Cornell and then my second grad degree in MBA from Harvard University.
Speaker 1:Cool. And what were your undergrad degrees then? Economics?
Speaker 2:Economics and then public policy, master's in public policy and then an MBA.
Speaker 1:Awesome, very, very cool. And just a little bit about your family. We were talking before we went on air. You're just back from honeymoon.
Speaker 2:Yes, my family. You know, if you'd asked me that before, I'd be talking about my brothers and my nieces and nephews, who I love so much, but now I have to talk about my wife, who is my best friend and my favorite person in the entire world. We just got married five months and three days ago. Yes, yes, we have actually have a count up clock in the apartment from and. So we met 527 days ago.
Speaker 1:Nice, that's very, very congratulations. I think that's very, very, that's worth celebrating.
Speaker 2:I will take congratulations. You might want to send some condolences to her, but be that as a guy. No you married off right, I did.
Speaker 1:You know what we think. So I told just a little bit about your career. But do you mind just painting for folks, just kind of briefly a little bit of your career arc?
Speaker 2:Sure, Well, you know, I started my career at JP Morgan as an M&A banker and then, after business school, I went and did early stage investing at a venture capital firm which was amazing got enamored with entrepreneurship and startups, so I left to do my first startup.
Speaker 2:It was the first version of SpinBack, the company that eventually got sold to Salesforce, and the first version of it, Bob, failed, Failed miserably and actually left me completely bankrupt. And so you know, when people talk about their startup journeys or when people talk about startups in general, there is an over indexing to the successes, and I certainly am guilty of that when you know talking about my background. But without the huge failure and the huge depression that followed and very, very difficult restart, I never would have gotten to the other points. But you know, SpinBack failed, dusted myself off, started it again. We eventually sold it to Salesforce and then I started to work market, which you've talked about, and we sold that to ADP. And now I've been kind of co-founding companies and helping other entrepreneurs kind of get their visions off the ground as an investor, as a co-founder and chairman, and I wrote a book on the future of work because we were deep, deep, deep involved in that and in some ways helping to shape it with with work market before and after it's sold to ADP.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one quick thing First. I appreciate you know the, the transparency, that not everything works the first time and that you know, as you say, kind of like the depression and all that stuff. As an entrepreneur, one of the things that I've kind of coined is the entrepreneur's cocktail, which is equal parts hubris and naivete and it's like come on, this is brilliant and it shouldn't be that hard, and maybe it wasn't quite as brilliant and it's a hell of a lot.
Speaker 2:I will tell you that it's a great cocktail, Because it you do have to be a little crazy to do these things right. Like the math doesn't add up, the math says it's going to fail. So you have to be completely, completely full of yourself to think, Well, no one else has been able to do it, but I'll do it.
Speaker 1:And the thing is is self-policeness is kind of very good.
Speaker 2:The only people that do do it are the people that feel they can do it. Otherwise it does not get done.
Speaker 1:There is kind of a craziness to it. Last question what do we find you doing? You know now that you're married and everything, but what do you find yourself doing when you're not doing great startups and angel investing and all that stuff?
Speaker 2:Well, I am writing a film script is my kind of side project right now. I got very deep into a story that I am very, very fond of it. I won't worry with the story itself now, but it is very biblical and so I had to reread the Bible and there's a lot of biblical illusions to it. But it is a modern day story about a world where it has stopped raining and how society copes with this sudden permanent drought.
Speaker 1:Well, all right. What are you?
Speaker 2:I teased it. I teased it. I just teased it there a little bit. I thought I wasn't going to talk about it. Then I teased it, but.
Speaker 1:I'm ready to change topics now because that's pretty cool. So what we're going to talk about today, because a lot of our audience is either HR executives a lot of a lot of our audience are HR executives and then obviously just people in the workforce. Hopefully we're all working our way to finding our next job. But you've got a book that sounds a little dystopian because it's called the end of jobs. So can you kind of the title and the inspiration behind the book?
Speaker 2:Well, the title really. Was my publisher pushing a provocative title? That is probably not, if left to my own devices.
Speaker 2:What I would have called it and I'll tell you a funny story is, well, it's not funny at all actually. But the book came out in June of 2020, at the height of the pandemic where we did lose 20 million jobs in the United States. And I was at ADP at the time and ADP had bought thousands of copies of the book and they were going to send it out and they felt that, given its title, that it would be inappropriate to send out to their clients at that point in time and I agreed. I was like, yeah, no, we can't send this. This is not a great title when so many people lost their jobs.
Speaker 2:Now, obviously, we saw a very quick snapback and those people mostly rehired, but that was why the name of the book. But it is supposed to be this misdirection. It is not saying that jobs are ending. It is saying the job as we know it the kind of nine to five, one manager job that job is ending and we are moving to a more on demand construct. Not that all jobs are going 1099 or 10, they are not but all of the things that permeate that type of work are coming into the full-time labor force.
Speaker 1:Well, what are some of those underlying forces in that would create that dynamic?
Speaker 2:So look, if we look at the history of work and the main focus of the book was to say if we look at history, if we look at data, if we actually talk to the HR leaders that are doing the labor force planning, if we take those three lenses history, data and actual practitioners we don't suddenly create a crystal ball where we get to see the future of work, but it gives us the basis for making logical, reasonable and defensible predictions about how the world's work unfolds and unfortunately, that's not the reality for most people that stand on their soapboxes and talk about jobs.
Speaker 2:So, if we were to think about the history of work and we looked at the defined benefit pension plan, if we looked at the annual review, if we looked at training and development, a lot of those things used to be owned by the company and given to the worker and we see this slow evolution of no, no worker, you're in charge of your own development, you're in charge of your own training, you're in charge of the marketing of your skills, you're in charge of your own benefits, more and more.
Speaker 2:and when you start looking at that, it starts to look like An on-demand worker, a 1099 and so that's what I meant by the end of jobs, rise of on-demand workers and agile corporations.
Speaker 1:No, that it in a case, that sort of the misdirection, but it's really the direction. I think that you you said a lot I'm kind of working on something right now that is kind of coming at it from the workers point of view which is and we see this like work.
Speaker 1:I'm just not that into you like, because yeah, but it's like who broke up first because, like you said, like all these things Are, you kind of have gone by the wayside and there's sort of this Equal and we'll talk about the social contract in a bit, but sort of like these dynamics keep changing and the power Struggle right keeps changing and then even that seems to be happening more compressed time frames.
Speaker 2:Well, I will say this right, you can think about the history of the work as this undulating power balance between companies and workers that impact simply the supply and the demand, and when the supply of workers is greater than the demand, companies have power. When the supply of Work is greater than the number of workers, workers start exerting power, and you know, we are right now in a situation where there is a structural imbalance in the supply and demand in favor of workers, and so we'll see how that all plays out over the next couple of years.
Speaker 1:Well, let's use that thing as a jumping off point for, kind of, one of the key themes here, which is the role of technology, and that may actually kind of Flip it back, because, well, right now that imbalance exists, as you say, it's like well, women, maybe we actually don't need these workers at all, maybe AI and robots can be doing well.
Speaker 2:That is certainly what gets said at the beginning of every single industrial revolution. Now We've had three of them right the mechanization, electrification and computerization phases of the economy.
Speaker 2:We say this slowly people, because that's really important. The Mechanization, the moving from hand power to machines. Electrification was the second industrial revolution. That is where we put power into those machines and they became self-running, if you will. And then computerization, the did creating of a digital world and the ability to interact entirely electronically. And so you know, the mechanization.
Speaker 2:Industrial evolution is the one we all know. That's what we studied in school about the cotton gin and the weaving loon and the spinning Jenny, like these are things that Allowed an individual worker, instead of making one shirt every three days, could be a part of a team that made a thousand shirts in a day. Right, that is a form factor productivity increase. And when that happens, if the world only needed a thousand shirts, suddenly I don't need 50 people making shirts every two days, I just need two people making shirts for one day. So the question always gets raised in the beginning of these industrial revolutions. When this new technology comes on stream that creates tremendous productivity increases, we think, oh my gosh, is gonna be a huge supply and demand shift because the amount of workers needed drops, but the amount of workers doesn't drop. Right, that's this pretty much flat. And so, oh my gosh, all the jobs are gonna go. That is said at the beginning of every industrial evolution, including today, and it is wrong every single time, including today.
Speaker 1:What makes it wrong, but what was it Predictably wrong?
Speaker 2:it is predictably wrong because, as humans, we tend to romanticize how work was Complained, about how work is, and are very fearful about how work is going to become, even though, empirically, work has actually gotten better and better every single year for the last 200 years. But we just, we're just not wired that way to think it's gonna get better. Point number one. Point number two is that technologies do not almost ever have the impact that we initially think they're going to have, and so whether it's oh my gosh, we can suddenly do this with this tech no well, we actually can't. And then number three would be that it just takes a huge amount of time for that technology to actually propagate and Become present in every workplace, and for work is much more complicated, and all these processes are much more complicated than this exists. Therefore, that jobs going to go and in the book we talk about the ATM is an example, and my talks I usually talk about automated trucking as an example, and happy to talk through either one of those if you want.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what's what's pick ATMs?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm gonna give you a quiz now, bob. I don't know if you were ready for a quiz, but you're gonna get a quiz. I.
Speaker 1:Get to ask the question. Oh, you're sure you asked me so I'll tell you this.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna give you a fact, series of facts. September 2nd 1969 the first ATM was put in place. It was actually in Rockville Center, new York, in Long Island City Bank branch. It took 25 years for the ATM to appear in every single bank branch in the United States. 1995 is when we hit a hundred percent penetration of ATMs in bank branches. At the time, in 1995, in the United States of America there were 500,000 people employed as bank tellers. Question number one what do you think all the Experts in the future of works said about the bank teller job once the ATM and let's be clear about what an ATM is it doesn't disguise what it tries to be ATM is automated teller machine. It's a machine that automates the job of the teller. Like that it is very clear about what it is. What did every expert about about the employment of tellers in the United States of America?
Speaker 1:question one that was gonna go to approximately zero by the time we hit a hundred percent.
Speaker 2:That is correct. That is correct now. Remember there were 500,000 bank tellers employed 25 years later, 2020. How many bank tellers were employed in the United States of America?
Speaker 1:Now, I didn't go to Cornell. I'm wrapping my Tennessee degree on the wall that you can't see, but I'm going to go With the wild stab of 500,000.
Speaker 2:It's a great guess, it was 600,000. There were 20% more bank tellers in the United States. And it's interesting because when we look at the job of a bank teller and this is what I mean when I say work is complicated and jobs are complicated Automation will take the repetitive high volume tasks and they will remove them from the person and give them to the machine, whether that machine is an actual machine or a computer or an AI or a robot or whatever. Automated high volume tasks and the bank teller. About 50% of the bank teller's job is automated High volume tasks taking any money, giving out money, this, this, this, this, and so we would expect about 50% because they do move kind of geometrically. We would expect about 50% of jobs to go because the component tasks of that job about 50% of them are repetitive high volume tasks. And actually that is what we saw.
Speaker 2:The average number of tellers per branch Went from 21 down to 13. So we saw about 50% destruction in the need for tellers, but the number of bank branches in the United States more than doubled. And that's what I mean when we talk about the complexity. One, it took 25 years for the technology to propagate. Two, the job itself has complications to it because once you took that job away from me of the giving out and the taking it Of money, that repetitive, high volume tasks, as the bank teller I can do other things Customer service, upselling and a host of other tasks and the number of bank branches ended up being the number of bank branches ended up being the driving factor of the number of tellers, because we had general economic growth. So the story is to say that Any simple explanation of this technology exists. Therefore, that job goes belays the mass complexity that goes into labor resource planning, and that's why it's always wrong when people say, oh, all the jobs are gonna go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't remember who to attribute this to, but it's every complex problem has a simple solution, pregnant pause, and it's wrong. I think this is another case in point, talking about something more current and top of mind of people is AI, though.
Speaker 1:So are there some specific trends that you would identify or however you see it impacting the future of work as AI becomes more mainstream? What's sort of the functionally equivalent of yeah, I went from 21 to 13, but the number of branches more than doubled. So there's your math. Anything that kind of strikes you as an analog to that?
Speaker 2:Well, I think analogs are going to be really tough in the world to work because it's so complicated, but let's just talk through this notion of what is on everyone's tongue, which is chat GPT-4, soon 4.5, and the amazing things that can be done with it and other tools like it, using what are generally referred to as generative AI. So the ability for generative AI to create content to help people find answers to problems is a massive increase of productivity, and, for those that follow such things, us GDP expanded by about 4.9% in the most recent quarter, and that massively surprised economists, and the theory is and we don't have the data yet to prove it is that what really drove that were productivity increases. There wasn't a huge amount more hiring. We know the labor statistics almost in real time and the increases in economic activity are either driven by increases in hiring, increases in productivity. There's really not a lot more to that, and so we think we are already starting to see the increases in productivity that we get when we see a new technology come on stream.
Speaker 2:Now, that being said, how many people out there have actually used some generative AI? I mean the answer is about 100 million in the entire world, because that is the user base of chat GPT, and it's actually fallen. It's down to about 80 million that use it in the last month. Okay, so we have a lot of people using it, but that's actually when you think about the global workforce, not that many people. We're talking about a global workforce of 3 trillion people. So sorry, 3 billion people. Yes, strike that from the record.
Speaker 1:I know I wanted to see if you were staying on your toes.
Speaker 2:So you have a workforce of 3 billion people. Alright, 80 million people are using this tool, and most of it just to put into funny things and see what kind of answers GPT gives you back. Be that as it may, so how many jobs are getting impacted? We don't know, but I can promise you this there is not going to be, in the next year, a huge series of layoffs because of chat GPT. That will not happen. Will there be job losses? Without question there will be job losses, but what we talk about in the book is, while there are job losses in the near term, there are new jobs created, and those jobs certainly are going to be in AI and in data science and a host of other technical fields. So we will see job losses and we will see jobs be created and we will see an increase in productivity. That's what we see every time. There is no reason to think this time is different.
Speaker 1:You know, you mentioned that the book came out right. As you know, the pandemic, was in full swing. If you were writing the second edition of the book, what impact do you see? The pandemic, the whole, whether it's hybrid work or just anything else, it's one of the kind of future of work, outcomes of the pandemic. Would you have changed anything or would have added any additional perspective to?
Speaker 2:Well, I'll tell you this as an author, you will always change something. I mean, I literally had to say to my publisher I'm done Like I could turn this thing for the next six years, like I'm just done, just put it out, it's good enough. So apologies for those that read parts of it that say this isn't good enough. That's my fault. I just said I'm done Like. So I think any author would tell you that. You know you're always want to change some things. But in answer to your question, there was a very, very clear trend that happened quicker. I don't think the adoption of AI happened quicker. I don't think the adoption of robotics happened quicker. I don't think the movement to an on-demand labor force happened quicker, but the movement to a remote workforce definitively happened quicker. And it happened quicker for a few reasons. First, there were structural impediments to more people working remotely, and those were, very simply, mindset and infrastructure Mindset. We all know the boss that would say oh, I don't care what all the studies say about increased productivity, increased worker happiness, increased worker retention. I think that magic happens when everyone's together. I want to see everybody when I come in Monday at 9am and they're just antiquated. They didn't have a choice March, april, may of 2020,. They had to allow everyone to work remotely, and that helped change mindset where they said, huh, for some workers in some industries, in some jobs, this is better, not for all, not for all at all. And the second was infrastructure. It is one thing, bob, to say, great, jeff, you can work from home. It's another to make sure that we have secure IP tunneling that I can get into our systems if I'm outside of our four walls. It's another to set up the policies and procedures to make sure I'm included in everything even though I'm not in the office. And, again, those things had to be put in place. There was an unbelievably heroic effort by IT departments and corporations around the world to put in place massive amounts of infrastructure to allow people to work remotely and, for the most part, remote work is a great thing. I will always, always, always, advocate for flexibility in any system, and remote work gives more flexibility in the system. Again, it is not a panacea. It does not work for all jobs, for an all industries and for all people, and there are substantive reasons to be in the office. I am personally more productive in the office, but that is me. Just because what's works for me doesn't mean it works for my team.
Speaker 2:So remote work went from about 3% of the US workforce pre pandemic. It's very important to talk about these things in context. The first context, by the way, is 48% is the natural limit in the US for sorry, 42%, apologies, 42%. That is the entirety of the US workforce that can work remotely. We are still a majority have to be on site manufacturing and some services and agriculture, and both of those have to be 100%, have to be done on site and at 42%. By the way, we are the most flexible economy in the world. Most economies do not reach 42%. So we're talking about remote work. We are already talking about a minority of the workforce large minority, but a minority still. 3% of the total US workforce pre pandemic worked remotely. At the height of the pandemic about 40% did, and then we settled in at around 8%. That's where we've kind of shaken out, at about 8%. If normal trends had held I wouldn't have expected us to get to 8% for another 10-15 years, but we had happened in two. So that's the answer.
Speaker 1:Which you're right. I mean, that is sort of pick a topic the pandemic, microwaves, how quickly we got to something that would have taken five years or longer.
Speaker 2:True, but a lot of things reverted to mean Right. So we saw a lot of this in the trend lines. Right, they shut up, but then they reverted. The remote work is one of the things that did revert right. It wouldn't stay at 40%, but it didn't go back anywhere near the 3% or 4% we would have expected. If it went to 4%, I would say it reverted to mean much like e-commerce, purchases and a host of other things did mostly revert to mean Remote work has not reverted, to mean it is massively increased.
Speaker 1:One of the topics that you bring up in the book that I think is really interesting is this notion of the social contract. So, as you kind of laid out, in each of these revolutions there's been a massive power shift to the company and that regulations and other kind of mechanisms needed to be put into place to either reign in control, whatever this imbalance of power. Could you talk a little bit more about that? And then the follow-on question would be how do you see that playing out in the current revolutions, we always have these supply and demand imbalances.
Speaker 2:Sometimes they're temporary, sometimes they're geographic, sometimes they're skill set based, and when it happens, when workers get power, you tend to see workers say I want to work remote and I want to work flexibly or as a freelancer or a temp or something like that. And when companies have the power, companies say I want everyone to come in the office and I want you all to just do exactly what you're told and never question what I say. And let's be very clear throughout the history of work, the majority of power has accrued to companies. There's always been an imbalance, not in the workers favor, and workers needed things to rebalance that equation, because from a societal standpoint it's not good for companies to be able to exert that kind of power. And companies are doing exactly what companies should do. I'm a capitalist to heart. Companies should be driven by the profit motive and a general societal motive, but for the most part they are driven by getting as much profit as they can, and so workers do need help. They are powerless as an individual in that relationship.
Speaker 2:And there are three things that help bring more balance to the relationship. One is regulations. Companies can't just dump things into the ocean. Companies can't do that pollute, do whatever. Again, if left to their own devices, many companies would not do the right thing societally. So we need to regulate to an extent.
Speaker 2:Second is the social safety net. If we are going to have workers spend their lives not building their own home and farm and taking care of themselves, we are going to have to provide things for them. And so the social safety net was invented by Otto von Bismarck in Prussia, not out of any generosity, but out of a sense of social stability that either we give workers some base level or they're going to revolt. And you know what's terrible for work and for companies Revolts, revolutions. Those have never gone well, really, for anybody, except for the American Revolution, of course, but probably a few other good examples out there too. The social safety net becomes a predicate for workers in this construct.
Speaker 2:And the last is unions. And look, I could sit here for quite some time and tell you about the negative aspects of unions because, as we talked about earlier, I'm a big fan of flexibility in systems, and unions do not allow for that flexibility. But unions are a necessary, necessary balancing factor for workers, and so they have a very important role to play. I just wish they would play it a little bit more effectively. But they're doing exactly what they're supposed to do, right. They're supposed to get the most they can for their workers. We're having the workers do the least possible. Companies are trying to pay the workers as little as they can, as little as possible, with getting the most out of them, and then market forces will find us a balance in the middle. So everyone's playing their role, but unions are a very important part in that.
Speaker 1:Do you have a, do you have a prediction then, of where you think either regulations or unions or societal good kinds of things will come into play on AI to LA people's fears, even when they're wrong fears or probably wrong fears?
Speaker 2:Well, there's so many factors here. You know, the social safety net is pretty threadbare. And how much of it can we afford? Right, we are at a, the debt of industrialized countries as its highest point since the Napoleonic Wars, okay, so like we have had a massive debt cycle. And how much more can we afford? Well, you can raise taxes or you can cut services, right, like, at some point something's got to give there. So that's a whole massive series of dynamics. That is much more difficult conversation to have in an increased interest rate environment, because now more and more of government spending has to go to debt service. So that's problem number one with our social safety net.
Speaker 2:And you know, the wonderful thing about living in a democracy is we get to choose what kind of government, what kind of economic system we want. If you want more regulation, you want more taxes great, you vote for the people that are going to deliver that. I would argue that if you go too far, you're going to actually end up with a worse society, but that's my personal point of view. In regards to the regulation, I would say the same thing, right, like, if you want to overregulate, great, you can do that. And that happens when companies abuse their power, the populace rises up and you get a different kind of regime.
Speaker 2:The more I don't know, the more interesting conversation I think to have right now is unions, because unions were decreasing for the last 50 years as a percent of the US workforce. But they weren't decreasing in number. It's just people weren't joining unions. They had about the same 12 million members for 30 years. It's just the US workforce kept growing, so their percent of the workforce kept shrinking.
Speaker 2:You have seen a substantive change over the last five to 10 years where, driven by a host of factors, we have seen an increase in union membership. You have seen a massive increase in the view that people have of unions. Unions used to have a very negative approval rating in the populace. They've never had a higher rating than they do right now. We've seen massive strikes, obviously the Hollywood writer strike and the actor strike and the huge strikes we just saw at the automotive workers. We saw the largest strike in the healthcare sector just a month ago. So you're seeing a tremendous amount of union activity and we'll see if this union activity ends up better than the last bout of union activity we had in the 70s, which did not lead us to a great economic outcome.
Speaker 1:Well, it's interesting, though you brought up Hollywood and you brought up the UAW In one case robotics and the lack of labor it takes to build an EV, and they're like, yeah, you guys are going to have to make us whole on that, you can't just ace us out of that whole manufacturing process. And then, obviously, with Hollywood, because it's content creation in its core that there's lots and lots of arguing over the use of AI to create content. What was the seed content that allowed the large language model to even do what it does? And it's very interesting and, as you say, we're still super early days. It's incredibly complex Trying to undo this Gordian nod, if that's even the right word it's almost nigh and too impossible, but you can see people very early on in this thing staking their claims and taking a position so that they don't get hurt, as they perceive getting hurt.
Speaker 2:Look, and I understand their fear. We need to have very thoughtful leadership on this and unfortunately that's not really the name of the game right now in Washington. But if we don't do this transition and again there will be jobs lost. There is no question. When we think about manufacturing and employment in the United States, we have about the same number of people employed in manufacturing as we did in the 1980s. We produce massively more manufactured goods. And so people think, oh, all the manufacturing jobs went to Mexico, all the manufacturing jobs went to China. No, we produce more with the same number of people.
Speaker 2:Robots took those jobs, not geopolitics, not environmental policy. As another example, we rip more coal from the ground now than we did in the 1950s. In the 1950s we employed a million people in the coal industry. Today we employ about 60,000 people in the coal industry, but we generate a lot more output in terms of coal produced. So people say, oh, you know, environmental policy destroyed coal jobs. No, it did not. The Chinese or the Australians or other places mining coal destroyed coal jobs? No, they did not. Machines ripping coal from the ground destroyed coal jobs.
Speaker 2:But what is the right reaction societally? Are we better off as a society because we don't have a million people employed in mines? I would argue we are. Are we better off as a society if those people are building solar panels and a host of other things? I would argue we are.
Speaker 2:But you can argue either side of these.
Speaker 2:There are a million arguments to be made.
Speaker 2:But as a society we need to figure out what is the right place. But here's the thing I will definitively tell you when we look at history and we look at the job displacements that occur because of industrial revolutions, because of these increases in productivity and therefore the decrease in the number of jobs needed, and the job losses that do occur, we see a very, very harsh transition period before we get to that great point of more productivity, more jobs, higher standard of living that all these wonderful things eventually produce for us. And those periods of adjustment are tremendous societal dislocations. These are periods of revolution and war, and if we handle this poorly as you know, our government seems to be really focused on trying to do we do a tremendous disservice. There will be more jobs, but we need to focus on retraining and making sure that people that are have the skills that are in the industries, that are in the geographies where jobs are dying, are able to move within this great country to places where jobs are growing and the risk goes to need to that point?
Speaker 1:To that point, do you think that the transition period will be less intense and of a shorter duration, given the nature of the kind of jobs that we're talking about? Because I think we're talking about generally, at least with AI, knowledge worker jobs. So it's earning a new skill, it's learning something new. I don't have to move from West Virginia to somewhere else to go do that. It's something that you can teach me. I'm a huge fan of tech boot camps. There's one that I really like called Personaulis, and it's taking people in a 16-week time period and getting them certified in cloud computing, and that person was working in a fast food restaurant 17 weeks ago. So do you think that, like I said, the intensity and the duration will be more contained in this revolution than maybe?
Speaker 2:other ones. You do have two factors here. One, this revolution is happening quicker than the others did. The first industrial revolution. Mechanization took us about 100 years. For those transitions to occur, computerization took us about 35 years. This transition will happen in 10 to 15 before the full propagation of these technologies. They'll continue to improve. Much like the weaving loom of today puts the weaving loom of the 1780s to shame, not the technologies and the capabilities that we have to retrain workers, because I will never be convinced that somebody wants a handout. Nobody wants a handout. People want to work. They want meaningful work and they want good work and they want a fair wage for that work. And those jobs exist. We have more job openings that we have unemployed people in the United States. We can do this, we can definitively do this, but it requires the right tax policy. It requires the right incentives for companies and individuals to make sure that we incentivize and motivate people and put those processes in place, because we can end up in a much better place much quicker if we do it.
Speaker 2:So I'm not hopeful on government, but I am hopeful in the technology and in companies innovation to create much compressed ways like the boot camps. They're great VR training companies. The leading one is a company called TransferVR. That is insane. You can put this headset on from your home or at a community college or at a high school and then you can learn how to become a diesel mechanic in like 100 hours at every stepping foot in a very expensive shop. That's far from home. That's insane to me.
Speaker 1:That's very, very cool. So obviously I'm optimistic that I think that it will still have some turbulence for sure. I just don't think that we're going to be banging our heads on the ceiling quite as badly as before. Everything that we've been talking about is generally around the future of work, and you've got a future of work prize competition underway. Do you mind sharing with folks? Sure Well.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you this man writing a book sucks, it just sucks. It is really really hard, it's lonely, and I was struggling because I really hate repeating myself and I find that most business books just say the same thing over and over and over again. And so my publisher said well, why don't you get a bunch of people you really respect to say what they think the world of work looks like in 2040? I was like, yeah, I'm going to Tom Sawyer this, I'm going to get a bunch of other people.
Speaker 1:Crowds, horse and baby come on.
Speaker 2:And so we have people like Andy Stern, who ran the largest labor union in the United States. We have the CHROs of some of the largest companies in the United States staffing industry leaders, trade association leaders.
Speaker 1:Even my friend Cher Johnny C Taylor Jr. Come on, show that to.
Speaker 2:Johnny. Johnny C Taylor wrote what he view thinks the world is going to look like in 2040. And one of the things I have the pleasure of doing is I'm an advisor to the X Prize and I'm a huge, huge fan of what they do, which is to put up a big cash prize, and nothing in motivates people like being able to win and win money, and so they have been an amazing, amazing source of good in this country and innovation, and so I thought let me copy that and I put up a $10 million prize personally for whichever the authors of chapter 10 of that book are the most correct in 2040. I wanted to do it empirically and have them all make guesses on labor force participation, average wage rate and a host of other 20 statistics I wanted them to guess on, and my publisher thought that was not very interesting, and so they all were given carte blanche to write a whatever narrative they wanted.
Speaker 2:Some people wrote it as a letter to their grandkids, some people wrote it as a speech at a graduation in 2040. We will gather them all together. God willing, everyone will be with us. We'll gather them all together sometime in early January 2041. And I will award the prize to one of those authors.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. But if it's appropriate not appropriate Can you share with us folks, even if you don't attribute to? It was, but some of the like wow, that was out there kind of predictions?
Speaker 2:Well, I will tell you, there were some predictions that were incredibly, incredibly pessimistic. The world's controlled by seven large corporations, like a very dystopian future, and you can potentially guess which labor leader may have thought something like that. And we had other predictions that were very utopian. You know, robots have taken away all of our menial tasks and we can focus on art and science and leisure and, per usual, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. I think we will have a. We will end up in a better place than we will be far from utopia, but we will, as we always have been, be a little bit better off, work a little bit less and have a little bit higher standard of living.
Speaker 1:One other topic I want to be mindful of your time. One of the topics that we've talked about before but I'd love to hear you talk about it, wasn't the context of startups, but, more broadly, is resilience. I mean, just, I think that's going to be the superpower. So that would be part of my chapter, or my essay in your chapter 10 would be the importance of resilience, because today is the slowest day we're going to see for the rest of our lives. Right, Because things just keep picking up and it's faster and faster and faster and whether it's pandemics, wars, threats of wars, you know technology, just everything, just mental fragility, emotional fragility, everything that's going on. It's like resilience is the muscle that allows you to not just sort of survive what's going on, but to actually thrive in the midst of it. That's kind of my take on it, at least in 30 seconds.
Speaker 2:I love for you to just up on the theme of resilience.
Speaker 2:Look, I wouldn't argue with that in any way, shape or form.
Speaker 2:When I give talks to entrepreneurship groups, startup groups you know accelerators and universities, people that want to go into tech, startups I will tell them the biggest variable in the equation as to whether or not you're going to be successful is you, and it's your ability to keep going, to persist, because if you stop, that's it, it's over. Nothing will pick up, the company will not succeed. You will have to find a way to get it through, and there will be a lot of people that will reach their hand down to help you. And many of us are way too proud, especially when we're failing to ask for help, because we don't want to say that we're failing and we want to think we can get through on our own. And so I would certainly say that resilience has to be that factor, and it is, by far again, the largest variable in the equation as to whether or not you're successful. But right behind it is looking for those hands, because there are people that we will be there to help you if you look for them.
Speaker 1:I do just to echo that for a minute.
Speaker 1:You know starting career club and you're kind of the original vision for what this is going to be, and I invariably start talking with my hands now, because it's like a Rubik's Cube and you just keep playing with it and you've got to hold on pretty loosely the DNA of career club, of being the advocate for the client, because this shift of the power, of the power that companies tend to hold in a hiring equation, to me has always been so out of balance that my heart's with the candidate and I want to give them more tools to help them be successful in finding the role that they're really happy in.
Speaker 1:So, while the DNA is, you know, we want to encourage, empower and enable job seekers. How that manifests with the product market fit is all those kinds of things Like I've gotten fairly agnostic in that I just want what works. I don't want to be right, I just want what works. And to your point, though, about seeking help, I mean, first of all, as you've got to back on, hubris is like hey, I don't think I actually have it all figured out.
Speaker 1:I thought I knew until you know I got hit in the face that maybe I did know everything I thought that I knew and how much better off I am for, as you say, reaching up for those hands, particularly people that have been down the road I'm trying to go down before, and it seemed like please like you know I'm a sponge please share anything that you can share, because I want to figure out how to deliver on our mission as quickly as possible, and I don't have to be right in any of that. But to your early point. But what I'm not going to do is quit.
Speaker 2:Can't quit, I'll keep learning.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm going to quit.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Look, you have a very important mission and the things that you're doing are helping a lot of people, and you just got to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Speaker 1:Well, why do you think? Do you think people give up? Well for sure, too soon. Do you think there are times when people need to give up and like your baby's not pretty, 100% Sorry.
Speaker 2:Look, there's a balance here. You have to keep going, no matter what and push yourself and blah, blah, blah, blah blah. But you also need to be listening, right? If, like, you've had a hundred meetings and not a single person wanted to work for you or invest in your company or be a customer At some point everyone else isn't dumb, you are You've got to listen, and so it's important to surround yourself with the people that are going to say you're not seeing it, you're not seeing it. Now, I've actually been that person for a few people and I lost some friends over it. One guy storm out of a lunch. He's like I thought you were my friend. How could you say this to me? I'm like I am your friend, but we've had lunch.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't be your friend if I didn't tell you this yeah, I'm like you keep saying that, oh God, that guy's dumb, he didn't get it, that guy's done, I need to meet you the next quarter. I'm like, hey, what happened with that? Oh, that guy was stupid, he didn't get it. At this point, everybody else isn't stupid, man, you are Stop. And he stormed out. He didn't pay for his lunch, which was I always, still ain't.
Speaker 1:But I'm not bitter, no no, no.
Speaker 2:He and I have patched things up now we're still, we're still close.
Speaker 1:So when you're I want to end on this because I'm always curious with executives this is maybe a little bit different than entrepreneurs. I'm not going to like hiring manager mode. You're building a team. You're hiring folks at your next company. When you're interviewing people, what are the talent traits that you're most drawn to that tell you this person, this is who I want.
Speaker 2:People that it is very clear they're willing to work hard and that they have a good attitude. You give someone that is smart, that is working hard and has a positive attitude and I'll take that person for almost any kind of role. But I am really really difficult to interview with and if any of your listeners have ever interviewed you're a job. Look man, I was trained on the M&A floor at JP Morgan and their approach to interviewing is to be as harsh as humanly possible to see if you can deal with it and see if you can still think and respond. Because if you can't respond in the kind of relatively low stakes I mean not for you because you're interviewing, but relatively low stakes, 30 minutes you have how are you going to do when, like you've got a billion dollar deal on the line and like you have to crank something out in 30 minutes or the whole thing's going to fall apart?
Speaker 2:The amount of stress that goes into a client interaction and this and that, and so when I would interview people for work market, I would bring up a screen and say all right, they'd be like hi, I'm Stephanie. I'm like I don't care what your name is Like. Here's a screen your customer support rep. That's the role you're interviewing for. I'm going to be a customer. I'm going to be pissed about something. Are you ready? It doesn't matter, let's go and like. If you can't hack it, if you can't hack it for 15 minutes in that room, what are you going to do when a client calls up and they're losing a million dollars in revenue because our system went down and they are screaming at you and so like. That's what I would do. But that all being said, I do think that hard work, intellect and just having a positive attitude will take you 99% of the places you need to go.
Speaker 1:Will you use that same MO on your next company?
Speaker 2:whatever your next adventure is in your hand, Well, you know, as you know, I am actually in stealth right now and so I've actually hired a soccer team there are 11 of us now and yeah, yeah, and I had two of my co-founders say to me because I'm still at the point where I interview everybody like we very quickly will get to a point where they'll hire people and I'll never meet them and that'll be great, but for now it is still important in this little nucleus of the team. And I did get a ping from two of my co-founders being like well, this person doesn't want to work here now because he was such a jerk to them. I'm like okay, great, then they shouldn't work here, no problem, there's literally a million people out there we could hire. Like if they couldn't act, it fine.
Speaker 1:Well, it's interesting. On a different podcast we were talking about culture and that, by and large, except for things that might be illegal or immoral, there's not a good culture and a bad culture. Is it a fit for you 100%?
Speaker 2:agree.
Speaker 1:And so if Jeff is like, hey, no, no, here we're going to go, you can't handle this, you can't do this job. Well, you're crazy man. Okay, I'm crazy for you, but for the people that are going to do really well here, this is like coming to work on Monday morning. We put our it's not a good culture, a bad culture.
Speaker 2:Look, I will. This is something I would. I'm a huge proponent of. Every company should have a culture document. It should be very clear about who you are, why you're here, where you're going, what your values are and all the policies and procedures and behaviors that support those values, because otherwise the values are useless. And so we put that up on our website.
Speaker 2:If you want to come interview here, we are very clear about what it is to work here and we can be incredibly supportive if you're a member of this team. But in order to get through that funnel, we happen to be in a very fortunate position as to where we are, and I only want people that are willing to be as persistent as me to be on this team. And if you're not willing to push through an interview that's a little uncomfortable, then you're not willing to push through when it's three in the morning and we're trying to get a release out. So that's who I want on the team at this stage and the culture over a company changes over time this stage, when there's no product, there's no anything, you're trying to create life, build something out of nothing, I need people that are willing to run into a brick wall and then get up, dust themselves off and run into it again.
Speaker 1:And if you were giving advice to 28-year-old Jeff that depends on hindsight what would you tell him?
Speaker 2:Career advice. Well, I'd probably tell him oh, because I was going to tell him to wait for Andrea, the woman I just married. You're like it's all going to be good man, just keep doing what you're doing. You're having a hell of a time, don't worry about it, and Andrea will be along shortly. The career advice I would give 28-year-old me well, look, 28-year-old me was just leaving business school and was four years away from complete and total bankruptcy. And 28-year-old me was unbelievably arrogant and I know some listeners might be going you sound like an arrogant jackass. Now I'm like you should have seen me then. Yeah, I would take him and I'd probably smack him a few times and say you have never had to deal with any real failure. You've never had to deal with things in the real world. And what I would tell him to do is probably quit JP Morgan immediately, even though JP Morgan had paid for business school. And I would tell him to get out there and just do something on his own now, and I'd start my entrepreneurial journey earlier.
Speaker 2:Because, Because this stuff is great and I love it. I love what I was made to do and when you know that you want to do that as soon as you can in your career, Right there you go.
Speaker 1:Now that's the thing to take away from me is find out what you really really like to do, what gives you energy, what makes you come alive, where you know you're using your talents and being able to make a difference.
Speaker 2:I will tell you about when I went down this road to raise money for this company. I put together some PowerPoint slides and I said I was some VC friends of mine and they were like why do you want to get back in it? Like, you know, you've been fortunate, you don't need to work, or whatever. I was like because I love it, I just love it. Like I love this part of the game and this is what I was made to do and I'm chomping at the bit, and so every CRO conversation that I have and that's who our customer will be, I am just so jazzed when I get on the phone during the call. When I get off the phone, I love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there you go. That is the goal is to be so jazzed in that when you're talking to your customer, you love it, you're doing the right thing. That's a fact. Is there anything that we haven't talked about, jeff? Because this has been. We've been all over the map and, by the way, your mastery of statistics is impressive and the number that you pull out of the top of your head is very, very impressive.
Speaker 1:Is there anything that you haven't talked about, as we just sort of close this out that you would want to leave listeners with?
Speaker 2:No, look, this has been a wonderful conversation, obviously very wide ranging, and I've just absolutely enjoyed it and I've enjoyed kind of the advice and what I would give to 28 year old Jeff, and so you know, if you were to ask me what book people should read, I would say read at the end of jobs.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, there you go, so we're going to flash that up on the screen and you can go to the website, which is chefwallcom, and you can order the end of jobs there. But, jeff, this is the end of this interview, but just the next step in what I hope continues to be great conversations with you. You're super successful, your mind is buzzing a million miles an hour, which is cool to see, and you just keep making a difference, and so I thank you.
Speaker 2:I am so again grateful for your time and for the opportunity to speak to you and your audience, and this has been super fun, Thank you.
Speaker 1:Awesome, so everybody's listening. Thank you so much for spending a few minutes with us. We hope you enjoyed it. Please check us out on careerclub and again, if you're watching this on YouTube, please like, subscribe, comment it helps or in your favorite podcast platform. And again, Jeff, thank you so much and thank you everybody.