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Podcast

The Future of Work

The Koe Cast

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  • AI Threatens Meaning, Not Just Tasks
    • AI threatens jobs and the meaning people derive from work, not just tasks themselves.
    • When AI can do everything, humans must become scarce by offering unique perspective and taste. Transcript: Dan Koe I want to ask you a question that may sound weird at first, and that question is, why are you watching this? Why are you watching this video specifically? Because you have access to ChatGPT, you have access to Claude, you have access to all of these AI tools that are supposed to get rid of information, make creators obsolete, make writers Obsolete, make everyone obsolete, but you are still watching this. And of course, you could ask AI for information on the topic that we’re going to talk about, or you could just paste the YouTube link into AI and ask it for a quick summary. And it would do a pretty decent job and be able to give you the information. But I really want you to think about that, right? Before you go all doomer on me and how AI is going to replace everyone, because that question alone sets the foundation of this video. It shines a light on what the future of creative work could look like. That’s exactly what we’re going to break down very extensively. And the problem is that AI is coming for everyone’s jobs, right? At least that’s what people say. And it looks like it’s going to actually become true. (Time 0:00:00)
  • Four Acts Of Meaning
    • Historical meaning shifted from divine assignment to work-based purpose to fragmentation and now inward generation.
    • In Act 4, humans must generate meaning internally through personal struggle and contribution. Transcript: Dan Koe Act one, meaning came from up there. So for most of human history, meaning was given to you by gods, kings, elders, and scriptures. You didn’t have to find it because it was assigned to you. This is in very early foraging societies. In Act II, or during the Industrial Revolution, meaning was found from out there. So science replaced religion as the dominant framework, meaning shifted to productivity and progress. You earned meaning through your work and through contribution to the machine. Then in Act III, where we are now, meaning was deconstructed into nothing. Meaning is found nowhere. This is post-modernism. We deconstruct everything because no single perspective is privileged. Nothing is objectively true. Meaning isn’t given or earned. It’s just gone. And that leads to Act 4, where meaning will be found in here. Meaning has to be generated from within, by you, for you. (Time 0:02:49)
  • Creatives As Meaning Architects
    • Creative work supplies meaning by synthesizing perspective, story, and feedback into value.
    • Creatives become meaning architects when they solve problems and share outputs for currency or connection. Transcript: Dan Koe There’s the mundane busy work, the repetitive work, the mechanical work, the assembly line style industrial work. I don’t care if that gets rid of. I mean that in the kindest way possible. I know that people’s livelihoods are at stake, but we’re going to talk about how things will look with that too. But then there’s creative work, right? The ability to see reality from your own lens, pull it into your mind, synthesize things together, create something, share it with another person, and then get feedback for your contribution In the form of money or currency or just another form of value. (Time 0:03:52)
  • AI And The Economic Loop
    • AI can break the wage-spend profit loop by replacing labor, threatening economic stability.
    • Future household income may shift toward transfers and capital, requiring broader asset ownership. Transcript: Dan Koe So the traditional economic loop is that you work a job, you get a wage, you spend, the company profits, and then that creates more jobs or the ability to pay. This is just a cycle, right? And AI breaks this loop because if AI does the jobs, wages collapse. And if wages collapse, spending collapses. And if spending collapses, the entire economic system falls apart. And this brings up the post-labor economics framework that David Shapiro created. He actually has a book called Labor Zero coming out about it soon. I would highly recommend going and watching his YouTube video playlist on post-labor economics because it’s very enlightening. And while it’s just a theory and it may not happen, I think theories are cool. And another thing about creatives is that the more attention you attract to a theory that leads society in a new direction and the more supporters you get for that thing, that tends to Create culture and society. The more attention that is invested into a creative idea is more likely to come true than not. Things just don’t happen. Humans build what they want to see in the world, and that could very much be a thing. So the very, very brief version of post-labor economics is that household income comes from three sources. There’s wages, so you get paid for your labor. This is what AI threatens. Then there’s transfers, like government payments, UBI, etc. But the problem with this becoming the dominant source, just everyone getting paid by the government, is that it becomes politically unstable and it distorts markets. And frankly, if we’re here for meaning, I personally will not find a lot of meaning just sitting on the couch all day collecting money. I need to grow. Need to challenge myself. I have maybe 60 more years on this planet, like unless we solve immortality too, but I need to do something. And then the third way is capital income. So this is owning assets that generate money. (Time 0:04:46)
  • Make Yourself The Product
    • Become the product by making your identity and presence the value people buy.
    • Build a one-person enterprise that attracts attention, capital, and support through personal brand. Transcript: Dan Koe So even though we talk about all jobs disappearing, all jobs are not going to disappear. There are still going to be jobs that require humans in the loop. So things like high liability roles, because you want a human accountable for that thing, statutory positions that have legal requirements. Then there’s the experience economy. So bartenders, boutique shops, art galleries, live performances. This is going to see a huge boom coming into the future. And then the meaning makers or the meaning economy, which is people who help others navigate the human experience. And then there’s relationship and trust jobs. So like sales, diplomacy, negotiation, etc. But the pattern here is that the jobs that survive are the ones where the human is the product. It’s not what they produce. It’s who they are. (Time 0:07:00)
  • Progress + Contribution = Meaning
    • Meaning requires progress and contribution to avoid stagnation and isolation.
    • Struggle and connection to others create a sustainable sense of purpose. Transcript: Dan Koe That way, you can engineer meaning. So in order to understand how to generate meaning, we need to understand what leads to meaninglessness. And there’s two killers of meaning here. There’s stagnation, so no forward movement, no progress, you just feel stuck. And then there’s isolation, so no connection to something greater, feeling like you don’t matter. And this is why modern life feels so empty. I mean, just look at your phone. You’re not progressing in any way. You’re not contributing in any way. You’re not connected to other people. You think you are because you’re in this digital world and there is some form of connection that can come from that, but you’re not globally connected to so many freaking people. And frankly, these companies profit from you being addicted to this thing, to this machine. If stagnation and isolation lead to meaninglessness, what leads to meaning? And there are two pillars here. Pillar one is progress, so forward movement, because humans need to feel like they’re going somewhere, not arriving at a goal and just stopping and giving up like the person who built A $100 million company and then stopped and then found that their life lacked meaning. But progress is achieved through creative problem solving. It’s through struggle, not through suffering, so to say, through struggle. There’s a distinction between the two, and I would encourage you to remove any negative connotations you have with the word struggle. And then pillar two is contribution. So progress and contribution, forward movement, and a connection to something greater than yourself. (Time 0:09:04)
  • Three Generators Of Meaning
    • Struggle, curiosity, and status generate meaning by driving progress, direction, and proof.
    • These three form the core of story that humans find compelling and meaningful. Transcript: Dan Koe How do you actually generate meaning in your life? The generators are struggle, curiosity, and status. For struggle, that’s the engine of progress. For curiosity, that’s the direction of progress. And for status, that’s the proof of contribution. Now for struggle, I’m talking about what you choose to struggle for because that defines what your purpose is. It’s not struggle that’s imposed on you. It’s not a goal that’s assigned to you. It’s what you consciously choose. So it’s like the creative who chooses to master their craft, to build an audience, to say something true. That struggle generates meaning. Now curiosity is non-linear attention. It’s following threads that don’t make sense yet. It’s not something that AI can make sense of. AI can’t be curious. And that’s how you solve problems or discover ideas that nobody is even thinking about because nobody else is curious about them because curiosity works in a weird way in the brain. I talk about this example a lot, but it’s just so simple yet so powerful is that if you were to take two people, me and you, reading the same book, would we highlight the same lines inside Of that book? Would the same things stick out to us? You may even think the book is just trash and it may be the best book I’ve ever read because at my situated point in my life, from my perspective, from the experience that’s culminated Over time in my head to create this very unique way of viewing the world that we don’t think is unique because we live in our heads, that’s where curiosity comes from. That’s your unique edge to an extent. You just need to learn how to channel it because like follow your curiosity. How is that practical? What does that lead to? We’ll get into it. But now with the third generator, status, status gets a bad rap. So let’s just call status recognition, recognition for your work or your contribution. It’s the signal that your struggle mattered to someone. It’s the signal that you’re not here alone in this void on earth. So what are these three generators? Struggle, curiosity, status. (Time 0:11:44)
  • Machines For Speed, Humans For Savoring
    • People pay for speed when removing friction and for humans when wanting to savor experiences.
    • The division of labor will be machines for efficiency and humans for narrative and meaning. Transcript: Dan Koe This is the question that everyone’s trying to answer, and this leads to a two-part insight. First is that people pay for speed and efficiency when they want to escape an experience. So this could be long wait times at the DMV, a fast food worker getting your order wrong, or bureaucracy at a company. But on the other hand, people pay a premium for experiences that they want to savor. So a five-star restaurant, a live theater, handcrafted goods. And I think this quote from Chris Paik illustrates this quite well, which says, the elegance of the future is not in man versus machine, but in their division of labor, silicon sanding The rough edges of necessity so carbon can ascend to meaning. We will abolish baristas and canonize chefs, silence agents, and encore actors. AI handles the friction and humans handle the narrative. (Time 0:14:33)
  • Attention As The Scarce Resource
    • Creator economy is the meaning economy: people pay for perspectives, curation, and narrative, not raw information.
    • Attention becomes the scarce resource and ultimate leverage in a world of abundant AI content. Transcript: Dan Koe Struggle, status, curiosity, story, narrative, all of this stuff. Okay, cool. But what do you actually do with that? What does it actually mean for you on a daily basis? What are you actually focused on? The first thing here is just understanding the shift in how money is going to flow. So the old way is that you get paid for your labor. You get paid for your output. And then the new model is that you get paid by the people who believe in what you’re doing and who want to see more of that in the world. In other words, you do something that you deeply care about and you attract other people to care about that thing, which is two distinct types of skills, right? That’s business and art. That’s doing what you care about with love, but also creating it in such a way and persuading other people to see the value in it so that you don’t become a starving artist who can’t sell Any of their work. So for the creator economy in specific, when you follow someone, when you follow someone meaningful, right? Not just searching for information, not just looking to get a quick tip, not when you know what you want to ask for, because now you can ask that to chat GPT. You’re listening to someone’s perspective. You’re buying their perspective. You’re supporting their perspective, their opinion. You’re supporting their curation, right? Whether they use AI or not, you follow a specific person because they are pulling the right ideas and making sense of them. So the scarce resource here is attention, right? Because it’s scarce. There’s only so much attention. There’s only so many people on this planet, and there’s only so much attention that can go around. (Time 0:15:30)
  • Use AI, But Own Your Voice
    • Focus on curation, taste, and human perspective since AI commoditizes generic content.
    • Learn to control ideas and use AI as a tool rather than letting it define your voice. Transcript: Dan Koe So what does that do? It increases the value in how much can be paid for something human and not necessarily just something human. Everyone’s going to be working in some AI assisted way, but a human perspective, a human point of view, the curation, the taste. You can have this, you can have AI spit out 5 words that are amazing, super beautiful prose. But which ones are you going to select to stick around? And the last thing here is that skills are being abstracted up a layer as they always are. How they went from human labor to more animal labor to more machine labor, and now they’re more to AI labor. So you don’t need to focus on the technical or the manual. You don’t need to set up a typewriter anymore. You don’t even need to know how to write anymore. I personally like to do my writing manually still. I do research with AI, but I see no problem with someone using AI to write, right? As long as they’re in control of the ideas and what’s being put out there. (Time 0:20:43)
  • Your Self Is The Last Moat
    • The ultimate defensible moat is you: if the creator and creation are swappable, AI can replace it.
    • Perspective, energy, sense-making, trajectory, and evolving taste are uniquely human moats. Transcript: Dan Koe So now for idea four, the last defensible moat is you. This is the core insight. This is the thing that if you come away from this video, this is the most important thing, not even the skills that you have to learn that we’re going to talk about next this is it and we’ll Try to make this point by understanding the swap test i’m calling this the swap test and this swap test is for knowing whether or not ai can replace you specifically if you can swap the Creator and the creation without it losing value ai can replace it if the value is tied to who made it, that’s your moat. So some examples is like a generic stock photo. Obviously, that’s swappable. AI can do it. What about a photograph from a famous photographer? That’s not really swappable because the value is in her eye, her choices, her reputation, everything else that influences how you perceive the photo or image. What about a generic post about productivity? Obviously, that’s swappable. What about an essay by someone whose journey you followed for years? That’s not really swappable because you haven’t followed a specific trajectory or story from AI for years. It doesn’t hit the same if that essay is just given to you one day randomly by AI. So what can AI not replicate? The first thing is perspective, because AI can think about your perspective, but it cannot think from it. It can analyze what it means to be a first-generation immigrant building a creative career, but it cannot be one. Your perspective is shaped by your beliefs, your experiences, your wounds, your wins. AI has none of these because it has no stakes. The second thing is your energy signature. And speaking of energy signature, I actually posted an article to my substack about it’s a prompt for how to find your intellectual signature. And what I mean by intellectual signature is just this. It’s what ideas are the most important to you that you can pull together, connect, synthesize to create this unique style of content. If you want to do the content creator route or kind of thought leadership, even though I hate that word, you like deep ideas and you find meaning in those and you want to share them. That’s who that’s for. So check that out if you want, link in the description. But the energy signature is the human ability to select what to focus on and why it matters to you. So two people can cover the same topic write about the same topic and it will feel completely different when you read it. AI can mimic the style, but it cannot mimic care. Now the third thing is sense-making because AI can process information, but it cannot decide what information means. It cannot frame, it cannot prioritize, it cannot say this matters and this doesn’t. Sense-making is inherently human because it requires stakes. AI has no stakes. AI does not die. And that’s just it. That’s number four, which is trajectory. Because you have a life. You have a past. You have a present. You have a future. You have a story arc. AI doesn’t have a trajectory. It doesn’t have any mortality. It doesn’t have any temporal compression. So if we solve immortality one day, it’s still not the same. If we live forever, this moment still passes. Right now, this thing that we’re living in right now, what I just said is gone. I can’t redo it. I can’t re-simulate it. I can’t try over again. People think immortality will make life meaningless, but I don’t think it will for that reason. (Time 0:22:11)
  • Practice Agency Daily
    • Develop agency by choosing problems deliberately and rejecting default life scripts.
    • Practice curiosity and use status as fuel to act without permission and iterate through mistakes. Transcript: Dan Koe I’ve said things like marketing, sales, writing, speaking, all of these other things. But I want to go higher level because we have to abstract out a bit. So this is more of a skill hierarchy than it is just a list of skills that you need to learn. And the thing here is that these aren’t career specific skills because you aren’t going into a specific career. These are human skills. So this is just uncovering what your nature and how to lean more into it. So the skill stack or hierarchy is first agency, the meta skill, then taste, perspective, persuasion, and then technical know-how. So knowing how to use a software or use AI. And these are ordered in a very specific way because they’re a hierarchy. They’re umbrellaed under one another and one comes before the other. So agency or the meta skill is the ability to act without permission or prompting. It’s creating your own story. It’s setting your own trajectory. It’s not waiting for someone to tell you what to do or who to be. Now why is it the meta skill? Because agency is what allows you to develop all other skills. Without agency you’re just following someone else’s path, and that path is being automated. So how do you actually practice agency? That’s through leaning in to the three generators of meaning. Struggle, status, curiosity. For struggle, you make deliberate choices. You reject conformity. You choose your own problems to solve. For status, money becomes a tool for agency, not just a metric of productivity. You’re choosing to do what you want with money as the fuel. Then through curiosity, you’re filtering signal from noise. You’re following threads that interest you. (Time 0:26:02)
  • Train Your Taste By Shipping
    • Build taste by creating, curating, and iterating to see what resonates with real people.
    • Use agency to make decisions, learn from feedback, and refine discernment over time. Transcript: Dan Koe And the best way to understand the importance of taste, because everyone tells you, oh, you need taste, you need taste, you need agency, you need this. Why does taste actually matter? For that, we look at the infinite library problem, which some of you may have heard before. But in essence, if there’s a library and that library has every possible permutation of any word ever written, ever, it just has everything, then it’s meaningless. It’s worthless. There’s no opinion worth looking at. And then there’s the infinite monkey problem, where if you take infinite monkeys and have them just type for a billion years, eventually one will produce Shakespeare. But again, what worth is that? You’re just going to look at it and you’re going to be like, oh, well, yeah, it’s good, but it took a monkey a billion years and they have no idea what they’re writing about. Like it doesn’t, it doesn’t mean anything. So the insight here is that curation matters more than creation. You have to select what matters and share it with another person. So how do you actually develop taste? You develop taste by building things, by creating or curating or putting things out there and seeing if it actually works. You build your own thing. You make decisions. Agency. You see what works. You see what doesn’t. You iterate. (Time 0:28:20)
  • Broaden Perspective And Learn Persuasion
    • Expand perspective to hold complexity, nuance, and contradiction for better sense-making.
    • Learn persuasion through marketing, sales, and copywriting to make people care about your work. Transcript: Dan Koe It’s expanding your human capacity. Now, we’ve talked about the levels of ego development, or that could also be synonymous with perspective development many times in the past. But as you develop your perspective, what you’re doing is you’re opening it up. You become less conformist, less ideological, and less dogmatic. You’re less stuck in this bubble. You gain the ability to hold complexity in your mind, to hold contradiction, to see systems, and to understand nuance. And so this is what allows for genuine agency and sophisticated curation. Because if your mind is so small and narrow, that contains the only opportunities and ideas available to you. You can’t create something unique if you’re extremely dogmatic. Now the next video is going to be specifically on this to make it more practical. It’s going to be called something like How to Think like a genius. It’s about how to tap into five-dimensional thinking, so to say, but it teaches you how to think and why that’s so important because many people don’t think at all. Now the fourth skill is persuasion, which is the ability to make people care about what you do. And that’s a huge problem for creatives is that they put so much time and effort into something. You have an author that works for 10 years on this insane book and then nobody sees it. It’s worthless. So to learn how to persuade, I would just recommend learning about marketing, sales, probably copywriting, and just building on social media. (Time 0:29:37)
  • Automate Busy Work With Tools
    • Master technical tools and AI to free bandwidth for creative work and curation.
    • Use platforms like Eden to centralize files and automate busy work so you can focus on meaning-making. Transcript: Dan Koe So this is like the practical thing that you can start trying to do from the ground up. This is like the vessel for how you’re doing what you’re doing. But it’s mostly just AI tools right now. Just learn new tools. Try Clot, try ChatGBT, try ClotCode, try Manus, try all of these different things, or try Eden. Because when this video goes out, Eden should be open to the public. We’re removing the wait list for a few days, so join if you want to try it but we just introduced projects and the eden agent and what eden is is it’s a drive that handles your busy work so That you can focus on the creative work so think of a drive where you can put up all of your files your footage your videos you can even paste social media links like youtube videos have Those transcribed and then you can ask the agent to do things with that information like i could tell it to pull all of my youtube videos and create a research document in this folder so That i can go and use that to write And then the projects feature is where I can, let’s say, write a newsletter. I can pull all of my sources in. It’s like notebook LM, but this is all in one place. Why is this different from other tools? Because other tools don’t have the foundation. They don’t have the drive. You can access your local files on your computer with Claude, and you can connect to Google Drive, which sucks. But how do you actually share it with a team? How do you share it with other people? You’re stuck dragging, dropping, copying, pasting. You can have Claude create a seven-day email sequence and you can paste a bunch of your context into there. Or you can already have all of the knowledge about your company in your drive and then ask the agent to build out an email sequence for a new project. And that’s also in the drive. And then your team member can log in, go in there, see it. (Time 0:31:18)