The Real Threat to Your Kid's Career Isn't AI... It's Outdated Advice (HM#1)

Hannah Maruyama:
If you're a parent right now, you're probably really worried about AI because we're all hearing AI is going to take all the jobs. Oh no, nobody can get work. And if you have a teenager or a young adult who's trying to pick a career, that fear lands pretty hard because it doesn't feel super abstract like this is your child and they're about to have to graduate high school, figure out what they're doing after that, and then get a job that is going to be their life. And it feels like work might just not exist. What does the future look like? Is it ubi? Is it massive unemployment? Is it Mad max? Is it iRobot? And then I just read a survey that 3 out of 4 parents are super concerned about what their child's future is going to look like career wise, because of AI. So today I want to talk about what is actually happening in the workforce. Like what is AI really doing? And why the biggest threat to your child's future is actually not AI. And before we jump into this, what do I know about this? I worked in AI and machine learning software for years without ever buying a college degree, by the way.

Hannah Maruyama:
And what was going on behind the scenes while I was in that industry led me to found Degree Free to help parents and their young adults find the best careers for them. My book, the Degree Free how to help youp 16 to 20 year old build a life they want has helped 16,000 families nationwide and we've helped hundreds of young adults find the right career for them in our launch program using the exact same frameworks. I want to share what we're seeing in the market right now and why AI is not the threat. It's actually how our system teaches your kids to pick work. Now let's start with the panic headline, AI is Wiping Out Jobs. It's Armageddon. It's the end of the world. Except when you look at the data, that story just doesn't hold up.

Hannah Maruyama:
I want to show you this post on X that David Sachs posted, but first I want to tell you who that is. He was the Chief operating officer of PayPal, and then he was also a really early stage venture capital investor in Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, Palantir, Airbnb. Basically, he's kind of a heavy hitter as far as business and work goes. And he's currently a co host of the all in podcast along three other pretty prolific angel investors. What was interesting about this post was that I was glad to see it because it's kind of what I suspected was happening. What he pointed out was that in 2025, AI was blamed for hundreds of thousands, millions, literally millions of job losses. But the real number, well, there was a study done, and according to the research, only about 6,000 job losses nationwide are actually attributable to AI. And even those are pretty questionable.

Hannah Maruyama:
I personally think that AI is the easiest thing to blame for layoffs that were already coming. And if you're a CEO, you think, oh, I can just blame the robots and that makes me look less bad. And it probably sounds okay in a board meeting. So that's probably why they said it. So I think the number's even probably lower. But the thing is, 6,000 jobs in a country with over 160 million workers is not an extinction level event. We can all say that AI has definitely created more than 6,000 jobs. 6,000 jobs is not even close to the job Armageddon that we keep seeing in the headlines.

Hannah Maruyama:
And you've probably seen them. They're on your little Microsoft suggested articles to read. They're on X. You can't scroll social media without seeing or what happens when AI replaces workers. All the graduates are unemployed because of AI. AI is taking all the white collar jobs. That's just not what's going on. And this is also just not what a job collapse looks like.

Hannah Maruyama:
This is what a technological leap looks like. And I spoke about this recently at a conference, but I wanted to talk about this because I think about a lot about the panic around ATMs and then the Internet and I want to talk about phone cameras in a minute. And that's a really interesting story. But think of the history of people panicking around technology. I think about Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. They said, oh, all the farmers are going to be out of business. Or Henry Ford and the assembly line. Oh, all the workers are going to be out of business.

Hannah Maruyama:
And then ATMs, oh no, all the bank tellers in the Internet. Oh no, all of us, we, we do this a lot. And we're going to talk about the release of the cell phone camera in the United States and what happened after that in a minute. Quick pause. If you're a parent trying to understand what is actually happening with Gen Z, AI, education and work. Subscribe because the show exists to cut through the panic and give you real information on what's actually happening in the world of work so you can help your child make better decisions for their future. So if AI is not the real threat, then what is the real problem is the college industrial complex? We're taking young people's most valuable years, their late teens and their early 20s, and we're placing them on a conveyor belt designed for a completely different economy. College today does three massively damaging things.

Hannah Maruyama:
And the worst part is we do this to all kids. We tell them that that's what they're supposed to do. So 62% of American teenagers go to college. But the thing is, only 7.7% of all the jobs in our country legally require degrees. And in the meantime, college today does three massively damaging things to young people. The first is it consumes years, years of time, not four, five and a half on average, that need to be spent building actual work experience and a real network. And professors who've never worked outside of academia and other drunk 18 year olds are not a network. Secondly, it loads young people with debt, and a lot of it, 108 to $156,000 on average before they've even earned a dollar.

Hannah Maruyama:
A lot of them have never worked. They don't understand how work even works. And please don't get me started on how out of touch the professors are. They just have no idea what market these kids are going into. They spend more time using AI to make their own PowerPoint presentations and then AI to catch kids who are using AI to do their homework than they do teaching the kids how to use the AI that they will need in order to get work in the job market that they are going into. I really couldn't think of a better example about how archaic this thing that people are paying a premium for is. And then third, and probably one of the worst is that college really distorts expectations about pay progression. And then professional readiness.

Hannah Maruyama:
It ruins the most valuable thing that entry level employees have. Their attitude, instead of learning how to work up, many graduates are taught to expect a payoff that is not going to exist and that they won't get. And then they're understandably super disenchanted with work and then their lives in general, which is a shame because they could have been excited and they could have gotten a positive feedback loop instead of feeling so discouraged. And that mismatch between what grads are going to earn and what's really in the market is colleges. They teach that, they imply that they'll make a lot more. And it's literally called the reality gap. And that gap makes them really unattractive hires, which is damaging them into the future. And this is not just theory.

Hannah Maruyama:
Employers are saying this out loud. Medium sized businesses, like under a thousand employees make up about 85% of businesses in the United States. Small businesses under 500 employees make like 46 to 47% of the private sector workforce. And many of them are now openly saying they do not want to hire recent college graduates for entry level roles. According to the report, small business owners say that recent grads cost more, they take longer to train, and they expect wages that just don't match the market reality. And then they leave quickly because of the reality gap. And for me, the saddest part is that they never even needed to develop, that they could have avoided the entire thing and just gone straight to work. So what are these businesses doing instead? Well, they're hiring high school graduates or they're choosing not to hire at all.

Hannah Maruyama:
And this needs to concern parents far more than the AI doom and gloom headlines. And this is not only coming from small business owners. Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, recently said something that I think parents really need to hear.

Hannah Maruyama:
Is AI going to create jobs or destroy jobs overall? It will destroy humanity's jobs of like, you know, you went to an elite school and you studied philosophy. Use myself as an example. I did too. Yeah. Hopefully you have some other skill. That one is going to be hard to market. But like technicians, if you're a vocational technician, like we're building batteries for a battery company and the people who are doing it in America are doing roughly the same job that Japanese engineers are doing and they went to high school and now they're very valuable, if not irreplaceable, because we can make them into something different than what they were very rapidly and those jobs are going to become more valuable.

Hannah Maruyama:
What he's saying is really simple, but it's also really serious. The path from college to career is shattered. It's destroyed. It doesn't even exist anymore. And I didn't do it. Parents need to stop sending their kids down this path, thinking that it will lead to work. It won't. It will just lead to debt.

Hannah Maruyama:
And that's a structural shift, not a temporary trend because of technology. And a quick word from our sponsor. Just kidding. There are no sponsors. It's just me. If you need help starting these conversations and helping guide your child through figuring out what they need from their work and then what jobs might work for them and then which jobs require degrees. I'll link my book below. It's called the Degree Free how to help your 16 and 20 year old build the life they want.

Hannah Maruyama:
And there's a parent and young adult set. So you do these together. You're going to sit down at the kitchen table, talk through these important conversations and do these exercises together to help them expand their world of work and then narrow it down based on what they actually need so you know what you're looking for as far as strategic entry level work goes. Now let's go back to history. We've lived through this kind of panic before. Humans love to panic. We all need to have something to freak out about collectively as a society. Otherwise, what are we gonna do? We love to do it though.

Hannah Maruyama:
Now, in the early 2000s, I believe it was 2003 when Sonyo released a phone camera, the first one, the first cell phone camera, to the US market. People said photographers will disappear. They said art would die. And I always laugh about these quotes because this is just what we do. Photography is dead. It was supposed to be hard. And this is my favorite one now has been brought into the homes of the filthy unwashed. This is an actual quote.

Hannah Maruyama:
An art student probably said this and I think that they were probably unwashed, but basically everybody just said art would die. They said everybody was going to be replaced. But the opposite happened. And there's a great quote from a famous photographer named Ansel Adams. You probably don't know his name, but you might know his work. If I showed you pictures of what he's done, you would recognize them. And he has this great quote where he says the single most important component of a camera is the 12 inches behind it. And he's talking about humanity and its value, especially for art and especially for things that are uniquely human.

Hannah Maruyama:
And so all this doom and gloom about the phone camera was completely wrong because the opposite happened. There are more photographers today, more of them are self employed and more of them make more money than they did before. But let's forget the photographers. Often the results of technology you don't see immediately because it's complicated for people, and especially businesses to adopt technology quickly. So it takes time for these really big changes to happen. Which is why when I saw a lot of the fear and gloom and predictions about AI, it just didn't seem accurate to me because there hasn't been enough time to institute the big changes that people are saying are going to remove jobs. And then that same vein, what happened after the release of the cell phone camera was that social media, digital businesses, online marketing and independent creators now exist because cell phone cameras made content creation really accessible to a ton of people. It's a great example of how technology didn't erase work, it didn't erase jobs, it moved it around and then it created more, like much more.

Hannah Maruyama:
I actually created this graphic because I wanted to show people just how big this impact has been and predicting a little bit into the future as much as we can. But just in the last 23 years, I mean, Sonia releases the first phone camera in 2003. And then now we've got a $528 billion creator economy. I mean, we've got 300 million people that create content in the U.S. 3 million U.S. creator jobs. And then there's millions of businesses and people employed by those businesses now that exist solely because they were able to create content because of the cell phone camera. And one of the things that I saw too was the amount of infrastructure and the amount of jobs that are created when there's a technological leap to support whatever leap that is and those changes that are made.

Hannah Maruyama:
So a good example of this is that nobody could have predicted as a result of the creation of Amazon, how many delivery driver jobs that didn't exist. And now that. And now they do. And for whatever you feel about Amazon and delivery in general, those are jobs that didn't exist that now people can work. And before those people wouldn't have had the opportunity to do that type of work. And now they do. And so actually, I think there's going to be way more jobs than people can shake a stick at. And they're going to be way more flexible and way more human in a lot of different ways.

Hannah Maruyama:
And Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, said that he feels that AI is the largest infrastructure project in human history. And he talks about this because he realizes the amount of jobs that are going to be created in order to support this overhaul and changing of technology that we're experiencing.

Hannah Maruyama:
The AI bubble comes about because the investments are large. And the investments are large because we have to build the infrastructure necessary for all of the layers of AI above it. And so I think the opportunity is really quite extraordinary. And everybody ought to get involved, everybody ought to get engaged. We need more energy. I think that we all recognize that we need more land, power and shell. We need more trade skill workers. This is the largest infrastructure buildout in human history that's going to, that's going to create a lot of jobs.

Hannah Maruyama:
Actually made me think of that really iconic picture of all of the men sitting on the skyscraper in New York City, because I was thinking about FDR when he launched the New Deal. And this was to deal with the lack of employment in the United States as a result of the Great Depression. So all of this was artificial because it was all government, so it wasn't real. But during that time, a lot of people were employed because the US built massive physical infrastructure like dams and roads and power grids and all kinds of public utilities and buildings and bridges, so many things. And these projects reshaped the whole economy and also created millions of jobs, because that's what happens when you build and create new infrastructure. AI is different, but I think it's even larger in scope and more global. So the New Deal built physical infrastructure. AI is digital infrastructure, but it's also physical infrastructure.

Hannah Maruyama:
There's going to have to be so many things that are modernized, rebuilt, and then just built, period, in order to support it. So it's going to create entire new swaths of tech jobs, entire new swaths of design and marketing jobs, sales jobs, construction jobs, and think of all the services that have to support those things as well. And this is where thinking more dynamically about work is really important. Because all of those companies, all of this infrastructure, they have to hire people. That's hr, they have to pay people, that's accounting. They have to run the insides of their business, they have to have office furniture, they're going to hold events, and they need event planners and coordinators and rental spaces and disposable cups. There's just so many things that are going to happen as a result of this massive building of new infrastructure. So I think the future looks very bright and very beautiful.

Hannah Maruyama:
It doesn't look sad, it doesn't look like. It doesn't look dystopian. It looks really cool. Then I think there's going to be massive growth in healthcare, transportation, manufacturing, logistics, education, services. And I think it's closer to power being widespread or the Internet than it is to a tool. And I think that's what people are really missing. It's not going to eliminate work. It's going to transform work as we know it.

Hannah Maruyama:
And that's really cool for your kids because this is the world that they get to go into. And that's where parents really need to pay attention here. Because young people today, they're going to change careers multiple times and they can't afford to spend. None of them can afford to spend four to six years and well over a hundred thousand dollars on what is not even job training and is already outdated when they graduate. And it's not teaching critical thinking. That's the fallback when I talk about this. But colleges created a test for themselves called the cla, the Collegiate Learning Assessment. They then proceeded to fail the test at a 45% rate, which is a coin flip.

Hannah Maruyama:
They don't teach critical thinking. They don't teach employable skills. They teach. All they do is search $100,000 for a piece of paper that is not applicable to work. And all it does is slow down young people when they're trying to launch their lives, Especially when, again, over 90% of jobs in this country do not legally require a college degree at all. And the thing is too, AI didn't make colleges and degrees obsolete. AI just made it very obvious that degrees were already obsolete for employment. And colleges can't or won't move at the speed of the labor market.

Hannah Maruyama:
And the real task, and this does fall to parents, because parents are the biggest influence over their child's life as far as what career they pick. But now this makes it easier for parents in a lot of ways because you don't have to predict the future. You just have to position your child correctly now. And that means helping them understand what they need from their work so they can identify careers as they evolve and as they come out. Because the thing is too, there's 867 jobs currently in the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Occupational Handbook, but that's not accurate. And a good example of this is that in 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics added data scientists as one of the roles that they identified in our country. At that point, 1, 000 people were already employed as data scientists in our country. That's a job that makes a median of $112,000 a year, doesn't require a college degree.

Hannah Maruyama:
And they had data scientists employed at the Bureau of Labor Statistics before they even recorded it as a job. So that just shows you that they're not really keeping track, even though it's their job, of what occupations are evolving. And that's just because they can't move as fast. To our estimates, we think there's closer to 3,000 unique job titles and more added every single month. And so what that means for parents is you want to help your kids understand what they need from their work schedule, location, income, and work environment so that as the market changes, as new careers come out, they're able to identify, oh, this one fits my needs, or I'm just missing this crucial skill. I can go get that, I can go get that cert, I can go get that skill, and then I can go apply for these roles, because it's going to help them to currently identify real entry level roles with career progression, but also when they're changing jobs because they will. It's a guarantee they're able to figure out which set of skills they need or add and rearrange their stack as they go along so that they're not in a classroom guessing what the market might want later and then trying to figure out how to pigeonhole their degree that's already super limited and outdated into whatever that is. And you know what? This reminds me of a story of a young man we worked with who had left Texas A and M.

Hannah Maruyama:
He was in an engineering program but then he just hated it. He was in a P and within three weeks of coming through we were able to help him find a paid on the job training role entry level that was field service engineering for medical device repair. It gave him exactly what he needed from his work, a clear career trajectory there. And and then it also helped him get real hands on experience and network. These strategic entry level jobs exist and all of your kids can find the right ones for them. You just need to know how to look. But at the core of this, there's a huge amount of opportunity right now. But so many young people are just stuck in these systems that are just not going to survive this technological shift.

Hannah Maruyama:
And as parents, you want to protect your child's time and energy and money. Don't let them get shoved into an old system because you're afraid of AI. You don't need to be afraid of AI. It's going to create a ton of growth. The key here is helping them find the first rung of their career ladder. Now that ladder is going to look different than it did when you were growing up, and it's going to look different than when I was growing up. But you can help them find the first step and then from there the future opens up. And when they know how to figure out what they need from their work, they'll be able to recognize future opportunities as they are literally invented, because that's the world that we're going into.

Hannah Maruyama:
If you found this perspective helpful, please subscribe and share this with another parent who's worried their child's future is disappearing. Because AI is going to make your child's job. It's not going to take it.