by John Tamny
PRAISE FOR
THE END OF WORK
“In the hands of other writers, economics has long been known as ‘the dismal science.’ But when you read John Tamny you come to love economics—because he draws from so many fun and fascinating sources, from the Beatles to Xbox, to make it come alive. Best of all, The End of Work pierces through all the gloom and doom surrounding current trends of automation and artificial intelligence to advance a positive vision for the future of American workers. It rests on something called Tamny’s Law, and all smart people will want to read this book to know what that is.”
—James Rosen, author of The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate and Cheney One on One
“John Tamny’s The End of Work is the answer for everyone who dreads Mondays. In this entertaining book, he shows how passion is becoming the path to a paycheck. The future of work is bright!”
—John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods
“Professional video game players, video game coaches, NFL Insiders? John Tamny’s exciting book about the explosion of jobs that don’t feel at all like work will resonate with those fearful about the future. It’s going to be glorious.”
—Adam Schefter, ESPN NFL Insider
“The United States is where the world’s ambitious have long come to make their mark. John Tamny shows why. There are so many things that make America great, but arguably its best attribute is that its freedom correlates with more and more people showing up to work each day with joy in their hearts.”
—José Andrés, Chef/Owner, ThinkFoodGroup and Founder, World Central Kitchen
“Robust economic growth frees us from the burden of jobs that require little skill, are not satisfying, and leave most people facing Monday with dread. As robots replace humans in certain kinds of jobs, new, impossible-to-foresee jobs will be created, and fewer and fewer people will be going to ‘work.’ As John Tamny reminds us, they’ll be pursuing their passions.”
—Bill Walton, Chairman of Rush River Entertainment and host of The Bill Walton Show
Copyright © 2018 by John Tamny
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For Claire,
may you never know what
it is to dread Mondays.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
Why College Football Players Should Major in College Football
CHAPTER TWO
Intelligence and Passion Don’t Stop at Football
CHAPTER THREE
Education Isn’t Meaningless, But It’s Grossly Overrated
CHAPTER FOUR
What Was Once Silly Is Now Serious
CHAPTER FIVE
Abundant Profits Make Possible the Work That Isn’t
CHAPTER SIX
The Millennial Generation Will Be the Richest Yet—Until the Next One
CHAPTER SEVEN
My Story
CHAPTER EIGHT
The “Venture Buyer”
CHAPTER NINE
Why We Need People with Money to Burn
CHAPTER TEN
Love Your Robot, Love Your Job
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Come Inside and Turn on the Xbox, You Have Work to Do
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
FOREWORD
Andy Kessler
What do you do? We all get asked this at meetings, interviews, cocktail parties, everywhere. It’s almost as if the person asking is trying to put you in some cubby and figure out how you tick by branding you as a certain type of person, which magically unlocks the mystery to your personality. But these days, there are so many interesting, bizarre, and confusing answers to “What do you do?” that it’s hard to put someone into a predefined box anymore.
Depending on who is asking and my mood at the time, I’ve got lots of choice responses. Nowadays I say that I’m a writer. Or an author if I think someone might actually read one of my books. But I’ve also been a Wall Street analyst, an investment banker (briefly, until I found out you had to be nice to people) a venture capitalist, and for many years I ran a hedge fund. But I’m an engineer by training and used to design chips, install computer systems, run networks, and write code. I’ve even written a few video games. Oh yeah, and I’ve been a waiter, a car hop at a root beer stand, and even a baker’s assistant. (Actually, I washed pans, but he once let me put poppy seeds onto buns.) I’m likely to answer with any one of these or at least try to work them into a conversation.
But as I look back, I don’t consider any of them to be a job. The Navy used to run recruiting ads on TV with the tag line delivered in a deep booming voice, “It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.” That’s how I’ve always felt. I got a paycheck, but it almost never felt like work. It felt like, well, an adventure. New ideas to explore every day, new puzzles to solve, new concepts to explore, new things to learn. What’s not to like? I’m not a morning person, but because it didn’t feel like work, it felt like going to Disneyland. I was mentally ready (almost) every morning to start work.
Anyway, if it ever did feel like work, because I had a boss who was a jerk, I would quit and figure out something else to do. If you sum up all the jobs you’ve ever had, it’s a career. Looking back on my so-called career, I see it as a game of pinball, bouncing from one bumper to another until I found something interesting enough and lucrative enough and free enough of annoying bosses to make me stick around for a while and figure it out.
Of course, when I look back at all this, it scares the crap out of me. At any point I could have ended up at a dead end or fired or unemployed. It wasn’t the typical career path for the 1970s and 80s: doctor, lawyer, accountant, management, public service, military, or some other regimented and often narrow path. But my wandering worked.
I often wonder why. Really, why? By all means, coming out of central New Jersey in the fog of the 1970s, I should have ended up working in a factory. I did spend years getting an engineering education, so maybe I was more likely to end up at IBM perfecting some widget and wearing a white short-sleeve shirt, clocking in at precisely 8:11 a.m. and out at 4:42 p.m., with a twenty-two-minute lunch. Or maybe I’d have ended up crunching numbers wearing green eyeshades, only to be replaced by an electronic calculator that was faster and more accurate.
But I didn’t. Why? Was I privileged? Heck no. Lucky? Maybe. Right place, right time? Perhaps.
Though few saw it at the time, technology was completely changing work in the United States—how it was organized and how the idea of labor evolved into human capital, with brains being more important than brawn.
I’m sure any decent management consultant could construct a labor stack, with factory and food-service jobs, not requiring all that much brain power on the bottom; logistics, with a little brain and a little brawn, a little higher up the stack; management, which means dealing with people; and pure design, almost exclusively thinking, topping it off.
As cheap microprocessors and cheap memory have been followed by fast networking and cloud computing, technology has relentlessly advanced and allowed more and more jobs to move up the stack, leaving labor to less-developed countries. Sure, there is still manufacturing in the United States, but it tends to be higher-value products, complex machinery, and pharmaceuticals rather than clothes and consumer goods. So many jobs have moved up the stack that the United States is predominantly a service economy, meaning more and more workers are removed from grunge and sweat and turmoil and get to think for a living. That’s the secret to having a job that doesn’t feel like a job.
Years ago I wrote a piece on this for the Wall Street Journal opinion page and convinced them the title should be “We Think, They Sweat.” The iPhone and its software are designed in the United States in air-conditioned offices, and the only way you would sweat would be if you came in too quickly from kiteboarding on the San Francisco Bay and sweated through the pits of your Vineyard Vines shirt. iPhones are, of course, manufactured in China. We think and design. They sweat by running machinery and staring into microscopes and moving boxes around in the most complex logistics dance ever known to mankind. And our jobs reflect this.
I think two things happened that affected me. First, technology came along to bring faster and easier computing closer to all of us. Mainframe computers gave way to workstations and then to personal computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. The saying in Silicon Valley is that intelligence moves out to the edge of the network. Closer to you and me. We use it to think on a higher plain, moving around concepts instead of boxes and earth.
The second thing that happened was that databases came along to allow money that was formerly managed by the sclerotic trust departments of stuffy Victorian banks to be sliced and diced into mutual funds and hedge funds and eventually exchange traded funds. Wall Street completely transforms. But this financial transformation also allowed risk capital to fund innovation, changing Silicon Valley from sleepy orchards into the innovation machine it is today.
Years ago, I accompanied my sons’ middle school class on a tour of an automobile factory in Fremont, California. General Motors and Toyota had a joint venture they called New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc., or NUMMI, which was supposed to be a showcase of the future of automobile production. It eventually failed, and Tesla now uses the space to make electric cars. But back then, they had the coolest tours. After a few minutes in a conference room fitting all of us with hard hats for protection, they loaded us twenty at a time onto little trams that drove around the factory, carefully staying on a path of dotted lines.
It was loud, and the pace of the assembly line was faster than I expected. The tour was as frenetic as “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” at Disneyland. Every once in a while, you would hear classical music playing. The assembly line would stop and there would be concerned looks by some and smiles on the faces of workers on the line. We learned that anyone with a problem could pull a cord, stopping the line and causing music to play. This was an innovation by the Japanese (especially the classical music) to minimize defects. Better to stop the line and correct the problem cheaply in the factory than have a wheel fall off a vehicle after fifteen thousand miles.
After years of investing in Silicon Valley tech companies and seeing incredible innovation every day, I stifled a chuckle when I saw that pulling a cord and playing music was the auto industry’s idea of innovation. Eventually, the tour found itself at the most complex stage of manufacturing: the installation of the engine, which had been assembled in Japan and shipped to California. One man, who looked about sixty but boasted impressively ripped muscles, seemed to be in charge of this step. It was explained that with overtime, this guy, who was close to retirement, was making more than a hundred thousand dollars a year. Our tour leader pulled up close to him and asked into the microphone, “Any advice for the kids on the tour today?” With sweat dripping off his head and a partial grimace on his face, he muttered, “Stay in school.”
Technology wraps the economy in a fabric of productivity. Dress yourself in it. It’s about doing more with less. It’s about replacing older, less interesting, sweaty jobs with machines and creating more and better jobs requiring human capital. No one wants to believe this. The fear today is that robots will take everyone’s job, requiring the government to issue checks to all its citizens in the form of Universal Basic Income. This is hooey.
Machines augment human beings and slowly but surely replace jobs at the lower end of the stack. Buttered buns are made by machines. Airline tickets are sorted in databases rather than by human beings. Artificial intelligence can implement image recognition and sort photographs and tag videos better than any person can. That’s why the race up the stack toward higher and higher levels of human capital and thinking is so important.
The race is never over. Human beings will always need to improve themselves and increase their capacity to think. But along the way, the drudgery of low-end jobs is exported to developing countries that need it or is eliminated altogether. We are left with jobs that don’t feel like jobs, careers that don’t feel like careers. Our productive lives become a blessing rather than a burden. And every one of us contributes, not just some self-selected elite. Wealth gets created for a wider and wider swath of workers, rather than distributed by policy wonks.
Once you think, any job is possible. And it won’t feel like a job. Get ready for a life of adventure.
Andy Kessler, the co-founder and former president of Velocity Capital Management, is the author of Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs.
INTRODUCTION
“Man’s work begins with his job; his profession. Having a vocation is something of a miracle, like falling in love.”1
—Hyman Rickover
In the fall of 2014, my wife and I attended a Fleetwood Mac concert in Washington, D.C. Calculating that after decades of global popularity the band members were closer to retirement age than to their musical prime, we decided that we should see them live while we could. But watching them on a massive screen from our seats in the back of the auditorium, it was clear that they were having too much fun to call it quits anytime soon.
Mick Fleetwood’s joy as he thrashed his drum kit was astonishing. Even more striking was the intense happiness on the face of Lindsey Buckingham. Here was an amazingly talented guitarist doing what he plainly loved to do. You couldn’t separate his hard work and his passion.
A concert tour is grueling work. There’s a reason that musicians train for months before hitting the road. It’s brutal out there. As the Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards recalls in his memoir, Life, sickness from exhaustion on stage was the norm: “How many times I’ve turned round behind the amplifiers and chucked up, you wouldn’t believe! Mick pukes behind the stage, Ronnie pukes behind the stage too.”2 The members of Fleetwood Mac, though not as frenetic on stage as the Stones, work feverishly to the delight of their millions of fans.
Buckingham earns his living making music, but that night it was apparent that this hard-working guitarist was hardly working. The passion revealed on his face was a reminder that when a man pursues what he’s good at and what he loves, he’s not really working.
Buckingham’s glee reminded me of a story my father told me about a buddy at the U.S. Naval Academy who showed up sick one day at rowing practice. At most other schools he would have been sent back to the dorm to rest, but the Navy coach told him to get dressed. Rather than miss practice, he would sit in the bow and watch the rest of the crew row.
As the ailing midshipman observed his teammates in action, it was apparent which ones were working hard a
nd which ones were going through the motions. After practice, he remarked to the coach how eye-opening the experience had been, and from that day the coach required each rower to watch a practice from the same vantage point. You can’t hide laziness. It will be exposed sooner or later.
In an early nineties television ad, Spike Lee asked Michael Jordon whether it was the shoes, the socks, the haircut, or the vicious dunks that made him the best basketball player in the universe. But as Jordan will tell you, hard work and practice made him the greatest. He would practice with the same intensity he brought to a game, so “when the game comes, there’s nothing I haven’t already practiced. It’s a routine.”3
The same goes for future Hall of Famer Kobe Bryant—it was all about the work. His former Los Angeles Lakers teammate Ronny Turiaf observed that Bryant “was always in the facility by himself, working out in the gym or practicing on the court. He was always the first one to show up. I don’t know when he slept.”4 Jordan and Bryant revealed their love of their chosen profession by working like demons to perfect their game.
Warren Buffett, on the other hand, could never do what they did. By his own admission, the billionaire investor would starve if he had to make a living playing basketball. If we lived in a sports-based economy, he writes, “I would be a flop. You could supply me with the world’s best instruction, and I could endlessly strive to improve my skills. But, alas, on the gridiron or basketball court I would never command even a minimum wage.”5 In fact, if football and basketball had been Buffett’s only choice of jobs, he probably would have been thought of as lazy as well as a flop.
Fortunately for Buffet, he had the opportunity to become an investor, and he’s the Michael Jordan of allocating capital. Half a century ago, Buffett purchased a struggling textile mill, which he turned into the collection of blue-chip companies known today as Berkshire Hathaway.6 A lousy basketball player, Buffett has few peers when it comes to recognizing the world’s best companies. If you’d had the good fortune to buy a thousand dollars’ worth of Berkshire stock back in 1964 and held onto it, that stock would be worth $11.6 million today.7