The Apology America Owes the Class of 2026

0:00It's not every day that you go to a commencement ceremony and the graduates all boo the speaker. I struck a chord. What you just saw there is what happens when you're so out of touch, so wrapped up in your own bubble, huffing your own fumes, that you fail to see how what you're saying might not particularly go down very well with the audience that you're speaking to. We've got a bipolar topic here, I see. So these elites, these commencement speakers, whether it's Scott Porchetta, the music executive who launched Taylor Swift. You can hear me now or you can pay me later. or Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO.

0:32Interesting. They thought that they were just going to sort of put on their caps and gowns like I'm wearing now and deliver some stock off-the-rack commencement speech and most of the kids probably wouldn't even be listening because they'd be so hungover. They'd shove some pablum about all the benefits of AI. AI is the next industrial revolution. They could just kind of get away with saying this and that would be that. Instead, they got embarrassed and they got embarrassed in a way that has since gone viral and really showed America, I think, something that we're going to talk about today. This country was stone cold dead.

1:04So what I see when I watch these videos, well, first I say to myself, the kids are all right. In fact, they're more than all right. They're all right and they are p***y. They are angry. We are barreling towards an AI future where according to predictions from the industry's own luminaries, the industry's own CEOs, half of entry-level white-collar work is about to disappear. It's about to go bye-bye because the AI will do it. Not like in the next 20 years, within the next couple of years. Again, I'm not saying this, not some AI doomer saying this. This is coming from the CEOs of companies, Anthropic, OpenAI.

1:36All of these companies are saying that there's going to be massive disruption to the labor market, particularly the bottom levels of the labor market, and it's going to happen soon. So it's not hard to see why these kids are looking at that and then booing when these same people come up and tell them about, hey, how AI is so great, it's going to be the next industrial revolution, right? AI is rewriting production as we sit here. None of these people stop to think even for a second that maybe that might not go down so well with the young people who are graduating college into a workforce that might not even exist.

2:10Hmm. Yeah, no wonder. Revolutions, frankly, have been started over less than this. Now, of course, it doesn't really help that the AI industry has some of the worst mascots, the worst spokespeople that probably any product in the history of consumer technology ever has. These people seem to be like seriously anti-human. They seem like they actually don't like the human race when they talk. My kids will never be smarter than AI. One thing they could do is probably get some better spokespeople. But they also, they talk to our best and brightest, these college students, these young people, in the most condescending way possible.

2:40Oh, you're going to be replaced by the machines. That's life, guys. Sorry. AI capabilities are in the palm of our hands. And, and. As that smug Scott Borchetta just said in that clip you saw when the booze start raining down on him, deal with it. Like I said, it's a tool. The generational gap in how Americans view this new era AI paradigm, it's probably one of the most underreported stories in America right now. A new New York Times Siena poll found 47 % of 18 to 29 year olds agreeing with the statement that AI is, quote, mostly bad. For 65 plus, that was just 24%. So there's this big, big generational gap in how they're viewing this technology.

3:22The ruling class is pushing this technology so hard on the public without really even the slightest pretense about showing empathy or concern for those whose lives it is most about to disrupt. When you hear these tech luminaries talk about AI is going to cut the white collar workforce in half, it's going to disrupt the labor market in ways we've never seen. You can almost see the saliva. You can see them salivating. Hey, then do something about it. Okay. It's a tool. Make it work for you. Because, well, why wouldn't they, right? Labor is an input cost for these people. And AI is something that can render that cost obsolete or at least reduce it significantly.

4:00And imagine the profit margins. Imagine how much money you can make when there's no labor input, right? So you can see why these people are so excited about this. Now, what they don't care about or what they don't understand, but really what they don't care about is that for most people, labor is more than a paycheck, right? Labor is how people find meaning in their lives. Work is how people find meaning. That's not particularly new or interesting. Humans have been that way forever. That's why you're seeing this revolt of the youth against a future that, frankly, they didn't ask for and now are going to have to deal with.

4:28So with that said, this is the commencement speech that I would personally be giving to the class of 2026. Not that I was invited to any of these, but maybe we can use this next year if we're still here for it. OK, to the assembled graduates, first off, welcome. Congratulations. I want to start by delivering an apology to you on behalf of your country. You did everything that you were told. And you got screwed. You got screwed big time. Our politicians, our business leaders, spent your childhood and your adolescence really telling you that you needed to learn to code. Remember, learn to code, learn to code.

5:00Coding is your new ticket to the middle class. This is the job that the computers won't be able to do. It will protect you. Well, it turns out that was wrong. The AI can already code better than you ever will. So sorry about that. Oops, better luck next time. These people also told you that the way to make it in America is you take out a ton of loans. You take out a ton of loans,$250 ,000,$300 ,000. No price is too much to pay, especially if it's from a quote-unquote good school with a fancy name and a good reputation. You take out those loans, you study something serious like finance or law or engineering, and then you did that.

5:34But unfortunately, we were wrong about that too. The AI can already do most of the entry-level work in all of those fields, and it's only going to get better. Sorry, our bad. For many of you gathered here, the diploma that you'll receive in a few minutes is really already on its way to becoming a worthless piece of paper that you'll keep in a drawer, if you keep it at all, to remind yourself of just how badly you got screwed. Ken Griffin, the hedge fund billionaire, he just gave a little noticed remark. It was pretty interesting. He talked about how he was feeling almost existentially depressed because he realized that his firm's AI models were doing the projects, doing the work that his team of PhDs at Citadel used to take months to complete.

6:11It has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days. I got to tell you, I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society. Keep in mind, these are the best of these jobs are the best of the best, right? These are the jobs that are going to the smartest of the smart coming out of business school. These are the cream of the crop jobs on Wall Street.

6:50And you have a titan of Wall Street saying he doesn't even need them anymore. The AI can already do it. If these people aren't safe, what chances do you have? Have you thought about getting into HVAC? Now, the fact is the machines are already better than you at most things and they're a hell lot cheaper. And they don't complain. They don't take vacation. So you can see why they're being pushed this way. ChatGPT was released when this class, when you guys were freshmen in college, you've never known, you will never know in adulthood without artificial intelligence. That makes you a guinea pig. And again, for that, I am sorry on behalf of your country.

7:22It sucks. It sucks to be a guinea pig. But look, I'm not here to be a doomer. AI doomerism is a dime a dozen. Let's talk about what you can do about it. Now, the biggest thing you can do is to organize, which is really timeless political advice for anybody in any cohort, but especially for you guys at this moment. Gen Z and the generation that's following you could be a potent political force. But what you have to do is you have to all be rowing in the same direction. Now, the politicians, the CEO, the managerial class that really runs this country, they would prefer you all to be down and out.

7:52They would prefer you all to be smoking weed, doom scrolling on your phone, maybe doing a little sports betting on the side, because then you wouldn't be paying attention. you'd be passive. You wouldn't be paying attention to this massive restructuring of the economy that they're about to do. Mass layoffs, the destruction of the corporate ladder that, keep in mind, these people depended on to get to where they were, and now they're pulling up behind them. Data centers sucking up all the water and the electricity in your hometowns. Don't let them get away with it. Just don't. Find a spokesperson.

8:22Find a philanthropist. Find somebody with deep pockets who wants to take this fight. Create a super PAC. Why the hell not everybody else has one. Even foreign countries have them to influence our elections. Why shouldn't you? Make the ruling class, make these elites, make these CEOs, make these politicians go through you first. Make them get your buy-in before they do really anything, before they legislate on AI, before they regulate on it, before they give away the keys to this handful of tech companies, make these people even richer and more powerful. They keep telling us we have to move faster.

8:53We're going to lose to China, China, China. It's bulls**t. It's bulls**t. Don't buy into it. So that's one part. That's the political organization part. But there's also ways to build resilience that no AI model is ever going to be able to take from you. And that, of course, starts with understanding something really elemental that most people don't. Most adults don't really get this until they're too old for it to matter. The American economy runs on the consumer. That's just how it is, right? So the society, our society is built around convincing you, the consumer, to be the best consumer that you can be, to be the best materialist that you can be, which means convincing you that the currency of life is some combination of money, power, and status.

9:31But as all the grandparents and parents out here know, that's not true. The currency of life is time. So how do you make the most of the little slice of time that you're given on this great planet? And I've been saying this for a long time. It is a great planet. I was reading, I was listening to this podcast and reading about it the other day. Trees talk to each other. Do you know that? They talk through the roots. They talk to their neighboring plants about what they need. They deliver that message through the root systems. What? That's crazy. This planet's a crazy place. It's beautiful. Life is electric.

10:00It's an amazing life that we lead, an amazing world. I was thinking also the other day about how your generation, when you think about it, you're really the first in the history of human civilization who has the chance to leave the planet better than you found it. Think about that. Think about that for a second, right? Since humans were cavemen, since we were burning trees, burning wood to light the night sky. We've been poisoning the atmosphere. We've been poisoning the earth. But in your lifetime, it's possible. In fact, it's probable that technology, including AI, frankly, is going to come along and it's going to reverse some of the damage that we've done to the planet, to the atmosphere, some of the admissions that we've let out.

10:38It's kind of a cruel irony that you're also the most pessimistic generation in history when it comes to thinking about the future. My point is just to illustrate that technology is neither good nor bad inherently, right? AI will have plenty of good uses. It's just a tool, right? The tech overlords, these people that keep telling us this is the future, they want to believe that they created God and the machine, but it's just a tool. Your job is to figure out how to leverage it or, importantly, how to leverage the absence of it. And there's ways to do that. Let's talk about one of them. One thing you'll notice as you become an adult and get older, and God willing, you get a job.

11:12You'll notice this a lot in your professional life. Most people, most adults don't know how to write for s**t. I don't mean that just they can't spell, they don't know grammar. I mean, they're incapable of formulating and articulating thoughts in any sort of coherent way. Even very smart people, even, you know, leaders of companies often can't write to save their lives. Now, AI tries to solve for this, right? AI, you could argue it could write pretty well, but it doesn't really, does it? I mean, I can clock a piece of AI-generated writing from a mile away. Pretty soon, I think everybody's going to be able to do that also.

11:44And that means that the value of the handwritten word is going to go up, right? Because it's authentic, because it's something tangible and valuable, something the machines can't do. So write, write constantly, write down everything, write down your thoughts, journal, write a novel, write a screenplay, write a newsletter. Even if it's just going to your parents, it doesn't matter. Write, build that muscle, make it your superpower and read too. It's crazy to say that, but people don't read anymore. Reading is pretty valuable. If you just do those two things with regularity, it's going to put you head and shoulders above some of the people in my generation and older generations that are out there outsourcing their brains to the machines, to the robots right now.

12:20The ideal employee of your generation, the best possible employee in a corporate white-collar setting, is going to be somebody who has superb reading skills, superb writing skills, superb comprehension skills, but also flexible skills that can work across multiple areas. Think of it as sort of a new generalist. That's what you want to be. Authenticity, taste, point of view. These are the attributes that you want to cultivate because, frankly, not even the best AI models, no matter what, no matter how good they get, they'll never be able to compete with the authenticity, the POV, and the taste of a human being because human beings have lived real experiences.

12:55And the robots just simply don't. They can't because they're not human. Also, remember that no one in the history of the world has ever said on their deathbed that they wished that they worked harder, that they made more money, that they consumed more, that they were more materialist. Never, it's never happened. The only job that the dying ever say that they care about is parenting. And I'm not just saying this. This has been researched. There's been books written about this. People on their deathbed have regrets about how they parented more than anything else. So don't wait too long to settle down and start a family.

13:26That's really important. Have more kids than you think you can even afford. These are the people, your significant other, your children, your family members, even your friends. These are the people who are going to have your back. They're your ride or dies. These are the people who will keep you grounded in the face of all of this coming tumult. A family gives you the meaning that no job ever will, ever can. And I'll leave you guys all with a timeless piece of advice that I always think about, which I think is frankly a key to a lifetime of equanimity. Keep your options open and your expectations low.

13:55If you go through life in that headspace, very little can unmoor you. With that, I say congratulations. Best of luck to all the graduates you got this guys