The media wants young people terrified right now.

AI is coming for your job.
Entry level roles are disappearing.
Your degree is worthless.
Companies are replacing everyone with bots.
Please take your diploma and head directly to the welfare office.

Bullshit.

The job market is not a crater. Employers added 172,000 jobs in May. Unemployment was 4.3%. Job openings rose to 7.6 million. [BLS/JOLTS]

172K

jobs added in May

4.3%

unemployment

7.6M

job openings

But the doomers do have one useful data point.

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Recent grads are struggling.

Recent college graduate unemployment hit 5.7% in late 2025. Underemployment was over 42%. Gallup found that only 19% of college educated workers thought it was a good time to find a quality job, down from nearly 70% of all workers in 2022. [New York Fed/Gallup]

That data is real. It is just measuring the wrong game. It measures people competing on a degree alone. That category is dying.

The unemployment rate for true AI native builders is effectively zero. That is not a government statistic. No one publishes that number. That is my operator view from inside the market.

At Petfolk, at Cutting Horse, and across our five portfolio companies, we are looking for the same person: the AI native builder.

Not the person who “uses ChatGPT.”

Everyone uses ChatGPT.

I mean the person who is obsessed. The person who can vibe code, build agents, create apps, automate workflows, write research, analyze data, and turn a messy business problem into something that actually works.

That person is not entry level.

That person is dangerous.

And dangerous is exactly what companies want right now.

01 — THE SHIFT

Entry level is dead. Good.

For decades, entry level meant inexperienced.

You had a degree, some energy, and almost no practical knowledge. A company hired you, trained you, gave you low value work, and waited years for you to become useful.

AI blew that up.

A 22 year old with AI, taste, curiosity, and aggression can now do work that used to require a person with 10 to 15 years of experience.

I know because I am hiring them.

The best young people I am seeing are not waiting for permission. They are not waiting for a class. They are not waiting for their school to create the perfect AI curriculum.

They are building.

Some are computer science students who became dramatically more productive with AI.

Some are business students who would have gone into product, operations, marketing, or project management, but now can build real tools themselves.

Some are total generalists who discovered that with enough curiosity and reps, they can create things that would have been impossible for them five years ago.

The common trait is not a degree.

It is agency.

That is the new credential.

02 — PROOF

The WiseTrack example

I saw this clearly with WiseTrack, my personal media company behind The Advantage newsletter and The Advantage podcast.

I originally hired a producer with 20 years of experience.

On paper, great hire.

In reality, the work felt old. The process felt slow. The value was not there.

So I went the other way.

I hired a 22 year old with no real production experience, but who had spent a ton of time on social media and was using AI for everything.

She did not just come in to produce a podcast.

She came in and started running the whole media platform.

In two months, she taught herself

the entire production stack in real time. Cameras. Lighting. Editing. Software. Workflow.

✓

She built a backend app to track and manage all of our content.

✓

She built autonomous outreach engines on LinkedIn and Instagram that now book founders onto the podcast.

✓

She built an automated guest prep pipeline, so when a founder books, the system generates the founder background, company background, interview questions, and full briefing.

She walked in with no production experience and replaced a producer with twenty years of experience.

That is the whole game.

AI is not replacing ambitious people. AI is replacing people who refuse to become more useful.

03 — THE CONTRADICTION

The doomsayers are proving the point

The media loves the AI doom story.

A company lays people off and mentions AI, and the headline writes itself.

“AI is taking jobs.”

A CEO says AI will make the business more efficient, and suddenly everyone is screwed.

A college grad struggles to find a job, and the easy villain is AI.

The loudest version came from Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the company behind Claude. He warned that AI could wipe out half of entry level white collar jobs within five years and push unemployment to 10% to 20%. [Axios]

Scary.

Also, look at what Anthropic is actually doing.

It is hiring.

377

open roles on Anthropic’s own careers page [Anthropic]

That is the contradiction.

The words say apocalypse.

The hiring says something else.

Then look at Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world.

At VivaTech in Paris, Huang said he disagreed with almost everything Amodei said about AI and jobs. At Stanford GSB, he said that if he had to choose between a new graduate who had no clue what AI was and one who was expert in using AI, he would hire the AI expert every time. [Business Insider/Stanford GSB]

That is the split.

One camp

One camp says entry level is doomed.

The other camp

The other camp says the people who know how to use AI are exactly who everyone is waiting for.

I know which side I am betting on.

And the data backs it up. PwC’s 2026 AI Jobs Barometer found that workers with AI skills now command a 62% wage premium. Companies most exposed to AI are seeing faster headcount growth than companies least exposed to AI. [PwC]

+62%

wage premium for workers with AI skills

Read that again.

The companies using AI the most are not necessarily hiring less.

They are often hiring more.

AI does not just cut cost. It creates capacity. It creates new products. It creates new workflows. It creates new companies. It creates more shots on goal.

So stop asking whether AI will change the job market.

Of course it will.

The only question is whether you are going to stand there whining about the old market or go win in the new one.

04 — THE PLAYBOOK

This is the summer of AI

If you are in high school, college, or just graduated, this summer should be the summer of AI.

Not casually.

Not “I asked ChatGPT to help with a paper once.”

I mean obsession.

If you want to not only get a job but thrive in the workforce, here are the six things you need to do.

Buy ChatGPT Pro and Claude Max

Get the serious builder tiers.

ChatGPT Pro is $100 a month. Claude Max 5x is $100 a month. That is $200 a month total. For three months, that is $600. [OpenAI/Anthropic]

There is no free lunch.

Stop treating AI like a free toy. This is the best tutor, coding partner, research assistant, analyst, writing coach, and career accelerator you have ever had.

The return on this investment is stupid.

Block 40 hours a week for AI

Put it on your calendar.

Forty hours.

This is not passive learning. This is reps.

Use AI every day. Test tools. Compare models. Build prompts. Break workflows. Ask better questions. Make it teach you. Make it critique you. Make it explain what you do not understand.

If 40 hours sounds like too much, this article is not for you.

And neither is the job.

Build a complicated app

Not a landing page.

An app.

It can be native. It can be web based. It can be ugly. It can be weird. It can be for a tiny audience of one.

But it should do something real.

Build around something you actually care about. Golf. Fashion. Politics. Fitness. Dogs. Crypto. Restaurants. Sports. Music. Travel. Investing. Anything.

The more complicated, the better.

We recently saw someone who built an AI crypto trading platform.

He was not an engineer. He did not have a traditional coding background. He was just interested in crypto, so he built a complex system that could analyze markets and trade small amounts of real money.

Tiny stakes. Real money. Real complexity. Zero commercial goal. Zero relevance to anything we do.

And that is exactly why it mattered.

The point is not crypto. The point is that he started from zero, entered a complex domain, put real money at risk, and built something that worked.

That is the signal.

Agency. Curiosity. Real stakes. Follow through.

The builder beats the complainer in every field.

Write a serious thesis or white paper

Pick a topic you are obsessed with and go deep.

Not a five page AI slop essay.

A real paper.

Use AI to research, structure, argue, cite, edit, pressure test, and improve it. Make it sharp. Make it useful. Make it something you would be proud to send to a founder, investor, professor, or employer.

The topic matters less than the thinking.

Show that you can use AI to go deep, not just go fast.

Build yourself a weekly AI intelligence system

Have AI train you on what is happening in AI every week.

Pull from Reddit, YouTube, X, GitHub, podcasts, newsletters, product launches, founder interviews, and whatever else matters.

Track the tools. Track the trends. Track the workflows. Track what builders are actually using.

Then turn it into a weekly briefing for yourself.

Most people are going to wait for AI trends to become obvious.

That is too late.

You want to see them early.

Teach your parents or grandparents AI

This may be the most useful exercise on the list.

Take someone older who does not understand AI and make them love it.

Do not lecture them.

Build something useful for them.

A travel planner. A recipe assistant. A medical appointment organizer. A family photo tool. A personal finance dashboard. A better way to write emails. A voice assistant that helps them with annoying daily tasks.

This is exactly what you will do in the workforce.

You will take powerful technology that normal people do not fully understand and turn it into something useful.

That is the job.

05 — DISTRIBUTION

Then show the proof

Doing the work is not enough.

People need to see it.

Post the app. Publish the white paper. Share the weekly briefing. Record a video walking through what you built.

Send it directly to founders, CEOs, investors, operators, department heads, and hiring managers.

Do not apply like everyone else.

Do not sit in a portal with 4,000 other resumes.

Build proof, then put that proof in front of a human who can hire you.

06 — THE BOTTOM LINE

The market is splitting

The future is not going to split between people with degrees and people without degrees.

It is going to split between people who use AI and people who get run over by people who use AI.

That is it.

If you are in high school or college, you have an absurd opportunity right now.

You are not 20 years behind. You are not 10 years behind. You are a few months behind.

The experts are not that far ahead. The playbooks are still being written. The tools are still changing every week.

A young person with time, obsession, curiosity, and agency can become elite shockingly fast.

So no, you are not as f**ked as the media says.

Unless you ignore AI.

Then yes, you probably are.

Make this the summer of AI.

Dear College Graduates: You Are Not as F**ked as the Media Says

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