Stanford grad Julia Steinberg: elite graduates face 'economic nihilism' as AI hollows out prestige career paths

purchase. Well, if you can buy it and redeem some NFTts that could be worth some digital dollars, maybe you recoup your cost on the physical item and then it's a net free good and then maybe you can go in and ask it questions and now it's a value ad. And so I think this stuff is just changing.

It's a complete paradigm shift. I think I think no one's really ready for how I think the world is going to change.

But in terms of a value ad, you can plug in an LLM to a lot of physical products, just alpha for the room, you know, and and create a ton of value for your end consumer, which is ultimately your goal as an entrepreneur. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Always appreciate your perspective.

We got to have you back when there's more breaking news. Uh, and we'll keep we'll we'll keep catching up with you. Good to see you, Luka. We'll talk. Cheers, Luka. Have a good one. Bye. Really quickly, let me tell you about adqu. com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.

Say goodbye to the headaches of out ofome advertising. Only adqu combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. If you're going to be in Walmart, if you're going to be selling toys, you got to get on adqu. com. Anyway, our next guest is here, Julia.

Hey, how you doing? Doing well. I like the intro music. Yes. Welcome to the We are professional newscasters, as you know. You're one of a handful of people in the entire world that has actually visited the Temple of Technology. You've been into the Temple of Technology, the Capital of Capital. Yes. Yes, that's right.

Uh give us the latest and greatest in your world. Uh new uh new piece in uh Palladium. What was the thesis? What inspired it? Take us through the high level of the piece. Yeah, so something I've been thinking about for a while.

It was actually sort of inspired by this freshman at Stanford who I was talking to in the library, very very sweet girl, and she was like, "What are you doing postgrad? " And I said, "Well, I'm working for this magazine called Arena. They want to do books, so I'm going to be helping with that. I'm super excited.

" And she said, "That's a 1930 ass job. " And I was like, "Well, why is a 1930 ass job? " I was like, "You know, most people are like consultants or software engineers, but you're making like this very real thing that's like you can touch. " I was like, "Yeah, like maybe it is a 1930s job.

" I guess people a lot of people in the 1930s didn't have jobs, but there were some people who were writing books and publishing books. So, I was sort of thinking it's like, well, how do we get to this point where it's like you it is sort of like this weird thing for people to be doing something real and tangible.

And then I think it's also just, you know, I sort of feel like graduating from Stanford in 2025 in some ways I'm like out on the last chopper out of NOM like CGBT was only like super ubiquitous really my senior year.

Like sometimes you just walk into the library and everyone had chat GBT on their screens and it was just you'd go to section and the section leader would be like please like I know it's really easy to use AI but it would really make me sad if you used AI to write your weekly reading response and sort of just like all these things that were just like you felt like you're more practicing like acting like a college student because just AI was just making a lot of the dayto-day like obsolete.

And it's also just like there's a pretty good chance that like AI is a better writer than I am, there's a really high chance AI will be a better writer than I am in 5 years.

And I think it's like well if what I wanted to be is a writer and that's going to be obsolete or AI is going to be better than that me or like if my friends who want to be lawyers are just going to be replaced by Harvey and my friends who want to be software engineers are going to be replaced by cursor like what does the future look like?

Mhm. And I think I was also guided by this conversation I had with a wonderful professor at Stanford, uh, Jennifer Burns. She's in the history department. She has written biographies of Milton Friedman and Anne Rand. I took a really great class with her in the fall called Thinking about Capitalism.

And I had a lot of conversations with her just because I found her work really interesting. And she asked me, she's like, you know, you're sort of like pretty like imshed in like the current, you know, right-wing intellectual moment. who is like the defining in like economic thinker.

And this was back in like October, November. And I was just totally stumped. And when I when I sort of published the piece with Palladium, I sent it to her and I was like, this is sort of my answer to like what what is the economic thought of Gen Z or really of the 21st century. And it it's economic nihilism. Nihilism.

So yeah, are we cooked? Where are you most bearish? It seems like you're you're worried about a lot of different trends. Um is is is capitalism cooked? Is democracy cooked? Is um technology I'd be curious to get an anecdotal job market kind of update?

It sounds like we got breakfast last week and you were saying that sure somebody uh some of your classmates got offers from what was it like Teeu or something somebody to work in like a warehouse and they were all like super Yeah. And it was like become this like Shien warehouse manager.

And I was like actually that sounds like a really interesting job. Like if I didn't have something lined up maybe I would apply to be like a Shien warehouse manager. And there's this app called Fizz which is sort of like Yakyak 2. 0.

it's an anonymous forum for college students at particular campuses and people got so mad that she like dared ask Stanford students to stoop to their level to become a warehouse manager and I think there's it's it's sort of like a paradox because Stanford students believe that they are they are entitled to certain jobs and this is true of sort of like all IVS or elite universities but there are a lot of jobs that people aren't willing to do And I sort of wrote in the article for Platium, it's like the line used to be, well, the hardest part about Harvard is getting in.

And now I would say the hardest part about Harvard is getting a job that your peers deem elite enough to not feel any like social backlash or to feel comfortable in the rat race.

And I think it's Peter Turchin who's this phenomenal historian has written a lot about how conflict rises in societies when there are more elite aspirants than there are elite positions.

And I think especially as class sizes at these schools are expanding and the internet is democratizing access to education and democratizing access to power in some ways.

I think that these schools are in a really tough place because there it is not is no longer a guarantee that you can go to Stanford, you can go to Harvard, you can go to Yale and be upper middle class.

Is uh are are there really not that many jobs at McKenzie, Bane, BCG, the Wall Street banks, the big tech companies, the PMs?

It feels like we're we're hearing a lot of nervousness about job loss and not hiring, but it feels like also Mckenzie's printing a bunch of money just writing, you know, slide decks about AI transformation in the Fortune 500 or has the actual shift in what is a high status job changed and and and if it has, what what is the high status job?

Is it entrepreneurship now? Is it YC? Where are we sitting with that? I think it's I think it's VC. I think it's entrepreneurship just regards to whether they want to go straight to venture capital. Yeah, this is this is the golden ticket. Uh just kidding. We support venture capital. Yeah.

I think like anecdotally it seems that big tech is like that used to sort of be like okay everyone told you to study CS and if you study CS you'll have like a 200k postgrad salary and now that's not really happening anymore.

Like yeah, it's I think there's definitely a shortage of or especially in like more big tech firms which offer more security than like startups. It's a lot harder to get those positions now than 5 or 10 years ago.

Do you think that's more of a hangover from COVID and kind of Elon showing that he could run X at 1/5if a headcount versus truly AI disruptive to like replacing workers? I think it's probably both.

I think there was like the uh zero um well there was a time in 2021 where just people were throwing money at anything that they could throw money at. And I think we're in very different times now.

But I think I I think about it less in terms of just like oh what's the market like now and more in terms of like how has the social contract changed?

And I think for a lot of elite college students, the sort of social contract was for a time like okay, if you study like these three things, then postgrad you will have like and you don't up in college, you'll have like pretty easy access to these really important highpaying jobs.

But I think we've seen now that it's like maybe a job at Goldman Sachs as an analyst isn't that important. You're just like changing font colors for 110 hours a week. but also just we're seeing undermployment rates in these sectors.

I think the computer science underemployment rate is 1 in6 which is insane considering that pretty much every authority figure I had from ages like 8 to 18 told me to major in computer science. Yeah.

Do you Sam Alman wrote this post about the soft singularity and his kind of thesis was that if you went back to 1930 they would think we all have fake jobs uh and so we will maybe create new fake jobs. Are you optimistic about that at all? Yeah, I don't think the fake jobs thing is necessarily going away.

Like I'm in LA right now. That's where my parents live and every third person is an influencer. Um, so it's not hard for me to say let's hear for the influencers, you know, the hardworking content creator content creators. It's very hard to go slaves to the algo. Yeah.

But I think what we're going to see is just there's a lack of what we're sort of seeing it's like there are there have been fake jobs for I don't know maybe probably not eternity but for like recent history and what we're going to see is just the fake jobs it just the work becomes more and more meaningless.

Like I don't know what the fake jobs of like 5 years, 10 years from now are going to look like, but I think what like a key thesis in my article was that like Gen Z is simultaneously like hyper careerist, but like there's no career at all. It's just sort of floating around from one job to the other.

And because there's so much like hopping over from one company to the another, one firm to the next, there's never really any like real expertise that's developed and there's this shallowess in the work.

I think it's like my parents um especially my dad who just retired, he worked at one firm for like the vast majority of his career. He was like an expert in that in that field and that wasn't anomalous for people of his generations of boomers at all.

But I think now with Gen Z, it's just like, okay, you have one job for six months to two years and then you move on to the next thing. And these big companies have like incentive structures built in like McKenzie that has search time.

It's like, okay, well, we're going to after one year, we'll give you six weeks off so you can go and look for another job. And I think in sort of doing that, it's admitting that it's a fake job because it has no re real tie to its employees and no real tie to their employees sticking around. Yeah.

for some for some of the new grad roles, at least the big three, they they'll very much encourage you to go take two years off to do an MBA, which feels like I don't know, it just feels odd to me to like lose an employee that you could be just nurturing internally and growing and stuff.

Uh what what's the reaction on campus been to the uh the big AI trade deals, these massive offers? Uh are people most of those folks who are getting $und00 million offers, they have PhDs, they're published papers.

Uh maybe the new advice should be don't just get a CS job and then a CS degree and then try and go um work in big tech. Maybe it should say actually stick in academia longer. Yeah. I I don't know. I can't say just because like I'm not a CS major. In fact, I never took a single CS class at Stanford. Yeah.

But I also think the the people who go into CS PhD programs just like love the subject. And I think like the Stanford particular is very good at getting people to major in computer science because they just teach the intro courses very very well. But I think that's a very different demographic.

The people you just sort of want to check out for college have like an easyish major that a lot of people around them do so they can have a cohort versus the people who are like I'm really into systems.

Like this thing is like if you met someone at Stanford who was like a systems concentrator rather than an AI concentrator that they were like really in it. Um, I don't know. Oh, you're a systems guy. Name every system. This is symbolic systems. No, symbolic systems is a fake major. It's like the systems track industry.

I also did a fake major. So, I'm not That's so funny. It's fake. The realest major is art history. Higher employment than CS. You know, Symbolic Systems is like like literally every first employee at all the big tech companies who's worth like hundred million dollars now. They're all Yeah.

It's like they probably have a higher average income than the average comparative literature major, which is what makes it, but Oh, well. Uh, well, thank you for so much for stopping by. Jord, do you have any other questions? Let's make this You're new our You're our Gen Z. Oh gosh. Okay. We need you. We need you.

I I want more updates, reporting on the Stanford class of 2025. Where are they landing? We got a fake job for you. Gen Z correspondent on a live stream. Yes. New fake job. New fake job alert. New fake job. I had a funny idea when I was editor but never got around to doing it. And so one last thing was that we would