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

The media wants young people terrified right now.

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]

But the doomers do have one useful data point.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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

That is the whole game.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.