Emad: the turkey before Thanksgiving, 100 million robots owned by the people

Emad, you wrote a bestseller, The Last Economy. What do you make of the future of jobs here?

I think it's like the turkey before Thanksgiving. Um, getting plumper — you're adding the jobs, but the models have reached that level of capability now that you can replicate a whole digital workforce in a year, and then physically it'll come after. I don't think it will create jobs fast enough, but we can create abundance.

So I put forward a Champion proposal last week: dollar pre-money, everyone, all the kids own the equity of the robots and other things. But I think we can do one better. I think the government should have a massive infrastructure program and it should look to build a 100 million robots in America and they should be owned by the people. And I think that is how you get abundance. Like, again, if you want to have an end purchaser, make them owned by the people. Have that as this massive infrastructure buildout, because that will upgrade all of America's infrastructure. And I think that's where we have to go.

Elon said at the G20 last week, a robot can do the work of five humans. This is true. Like, factually, we know where it's going. So, I think that we have options of where to go.

In the meantime, we have to get ahead of things. There are jobs that will get crazy. Like, HVAC specialist is the one that I think — you're seeing electricians already earning $600,000 a year working in data centers. But there's just not enough humans, right? I think the government also in America, where it's going currently, will push back against robots. Um, and so electricians, HVAC — like, there's — you'll be surprised, especially in Europe, actually. It's so hot here that HVAC rollouts will do so well.

That's a really, really important point. I think, um, Andrew Yang actually, I think, was saying the same thing, that we're going to see this huge resurgence of trades. But I think a lot of people have been trained since, you know, a young age that a good white collar job manipulating a spreadsheet is a far greater ambition than being the best HVAC specialist in the world. And so they kind of demean the blue collar world. But the white collar job is the one that's going to become irrelevant.

And so a really good life plan is to become incredibly great at helping building data centers, cooling systems, liquid cooling, and then reinvest that money into AI companies that are riding the wave. Just as a life plan, it's a much, much better plan than aspiring to get a degree in accounting right now.

So look, like, it is inevitable that there's going to be the biggest infrastructure buildout of all time, not just in data centers, but again across America, across Europe. Our infrastructure is crumbling and governments will go there. So position yourselves there — if you're not using a thousand agents — and you will get the biggest tailwind of all time.