An abridged version of this piece can be found here: What If Everyone Could Code? (Abridged). I’ve condensed this essay down to its essence. I recommend it as a primer.

What if Everyone Could Code?

• What would unemployment look like?

• What would the pandemic look like?

• What would the world look like?

There’s no better time to ask this question.

The world was needlessly unprepared for a pandemic, and now we’re paying the consequences. But the people paying the most are the people who had the least to begin with. Aside from the lives lost, the most troubling component of the pandemic is the economic destruction. 36 million people lost their jobs in two months. Lockdowns eliminated 5 years of job gains in 5 weeks, and now we get a preview of a world that we’ve been steadily heading towards.

Most Americans aren't well off. We've been told that 40% can't afford an unexpected expense for a while now. COVID-19 hit the U.S., but it body-slammed Americans.

In April, 30% of renters didn't pay rent. But April 2019 – during a strong economy – 18% didn't. The economy was already frail – millions live below simple means. The virus is just exposing what was there all along.

Americans feel disillusioned about their future. They’re scared they don’t have job security. They feel exploited, helpless, and deserted. In my experience, fear comes from not knowing what to expect and not feeling you have any control over what’s about to happen. Pandemics are frightening, but so is losing hope about your future. COVID-19 reminded us how important technology is, and that makes people scared.

Tech is challenging to understand, it’s often abstract, and every day we see how much it influence our lives. While tech companies have grown, the average American receded into their large shadows. Americans don't know how these companies work. Even those whose job it is to create new laws and regulation don’t understand. Painful congressional testimonies further belabor the point: the layperson does not understand the forces governing our world.

As a society, we used to generally know how technology worked. People understood how cars drove, how planes flew, and how a light bulb glowed. Now, the intangible and complex aspects of tech escape our reach. Technical literacy vanished. Unlike last century, nobody wants to move to the distant future. Many dread it. That makes it hard to take the future seriously.

The consequences are severe: America is dwindling into a decline. We’ve neglected fixing what’s broken. Other countries, fueled by technological prowess, are opportunistically emerging. The U.S., alternatively, is heading down the wrong path. Contrary to prevailing sentiments prior to the pandemic, most of America was still reeling from the Great Financial crisis. COVID-19 pulled back the curtain.

We don't need to get back to how things were, we need to extirpate old systems that don't work, and do what humanity does best: build and create. We need to rebuild with modern assumptions based on today's landscape. Based on the Internet. Because the industrial revolution is over, and it’s time for the world’s institutions to move ahead. Those that don’t will and should be left behind.

Before we rebuild though, we need to understand what isn’t worth saving.

The Gig is Up
As we reflect on the past decade, I believe we’ll realize how inconsequential employment gains really were. Plenty saw a pandemic coming, and just like our health systems, our workforce wasn’t ready. A decade’s worth of job gains evaporated in 2 months.

One in four U.S. workers are unemployed now. Since the start of lockdowns, 52% of Americans under 45 have had their hours reduced, been furloughed, or been let go. The pandemic unleashed carnage on the economy, but that’s not surprising. Self-imposed lockdowns should hurt employment rates. But they shouldn’t make 50-year unemployment lows become 80-year unemployment highs. The takeaway: The employment gains following the Great Recession were a mirage. Work transformed, but not for the better.

Prior to COVID, 36% of U.S. workers participated in the gig economy. Forty percent of U.S. workers generated 40% of their income with independent work. This is the first crisis for the gig-economy, and it’s ugly.

Most gig and hourly workers walk a financial tightrope. These are the Americans from that FED study above. They can’t afford a hit to their earnings. Drivers especially struggle. A 2018 study found that 85% of drivers in New York City struggle to make monthly payments such as rent, utilities, car payments and other bills. And if unable to drive due to car trouble or illness, 70% would run out money within a month.

Then there are restaurants. More than 15.5 million Americans work in restaurants. Of those workers, roughly 3 million live in poverty. Most don’t have paid sick leave. The number of those that are considered middle-class—which pay between $45,000 and $75,000 a year—has grown 84% between 2010 and 2018, a rate three times higher than the overall economy. In April, 85% of New York City restaurant employees lost their jobs.

The gig economy collapsed. Ironically, the jobs championed for the autonomous worker made workers more financially vulnerable. Driving for Uber used to have appeal. Be your own boss! It made people feel like they were on the cutting edge, like they were actually riding the tech wave.

That wave didn’t amount to much though, because everyone tried to ride it. An under-appreciated contributor to ridesharing growth is how many drivers joined. Some were doing it to make some extra cash on the side, but many were turning to it for a full time occupation. Oftentimes because they couldn’t get a job doing something else.

When a large portion of a country’s workforce becomes unskilled, wages go down. When you’re competing against the rest of the world for these jobs, wages plummet. Globalization punishes commodities and rewards specialization.

A large reason a majority of the country isn’t doing well financially is because they’re working jobs that no longer matter, and they don’t have the skills to get the jobs that do.

Workers’ Demise
Decades ago U.S. workers had:

1. Minimal automation to replace them

2. Little competition from low wage countries

3. Sense of belonging to a company

4. Relatively lower medical costs than today

5. Relatively higher wages compared to the executive class than today

It was a good life. But these assumptions are gone. No wonder they’re in despair. Today, more of them are unhappy, drinking, and dying than three decades ago.

These changes center around jobs.

In the past decade, the fastest growing companies in the world were American tech companies. This should bode well for the American worker, except, they’re not qualified. It doesn’t help 63% of the U.S. doesn’t know how Google makes money. (That’s a study from 2017!). For the 37% that know Google sells ads, congratulations, you’ve met the first job requirement. And tech companies have done much to reduce job requirements: college degrees aren’t required. The challenge isn’t a willingness to hire, it’s an absence of adequate knowledge. Americans suffer as a result.

Only 7.8% of the U.S. workforce worked for tech companies in 2019. When you account for the sheer volume of jobs directly supported by tech companies, that percentage seems small. This cohort helps the tech sector account for 10+% of U.S. GDP. They’re rewarded commensurately. Average annual compensation was $111,000 per tech worker in 2017, 82% higher than the overall economy. In 2019, median tech wages were 90% higher than median national wages. Society is not yet ready to deal with the productivity and income disparity between a coder and a 20th century worker.

Why aren’t we trying harder to get more Americans in these jobs?

The 2008 financial crisis made big banks bigger. This pandemic is going to make big tech bigger — and fast. Whether its watching Amazon acquire autonomous driving company Zoox, or Apple and Google developing contact tracing protocols, we all see tech growing during COVID. It’d be wise to encourage, maybe even subsidize, our workforce to get involved. As it stands, people know change is coming, yet they feel hopeless about being in a position to capitalize on it.

Big Tech needs more talent, but they cannot employ all of America. Even so, equipping Americans with the right tools is imperative to this transition. Americans aren’t stupid. The problem is that our education system has an amazing blind spot concerning tech literacy.

The largest economic crisis in a century is coinciding with an economically imbalanced America. Job security and income inequality have been previously discussed in politics, but now they’re the center of every platform. Finding the right solution should be our chief priority.

From 1875 to 1920 American steel production grew from 380,000 tons to 60 million tons annually, making the U.S. the world leader. We built roads, bridges, and buildings at an incredible pace. But Japan emerged. By 1970, Japan’s steel production reached 93.3 million tons. And it was cheaper.

In fact, American corporations in general became inefficient and bloated. Foreign companies outperformed U.S. ones. Agile Japanese conglomerates are one such example.

American workers bore the brunt of the demise. Steel became a commodity, and the winner was the country with the lowest cost.

We outsourced the raw inputs, in this case, steel. Today, the raw inputs are manufacturing labor in Asian countries. The U.S. doesn’t have a great track record with commoditized inputs.

A few years ago a colleague observed that the taxi driver was worried about losing their job to the Uber driver, and the Uber driver was worried about self-driving cars. It may be an oversimplification, but it resonated with me. People are anxious about their future, in large part because they feel like they aren’t in control. What can they do if they can’t get a job? Will automation replace them? What will their children do?

The growing anxiety already manifested politically. We don’t have to look far to see that people are scared, angry, and eager for change.

A New Religion
When we speak of American decline, we usually talk about international power — the rise of China and India, and the waning of U.S. hegemony and moral authority. To most Americans, those are abstract things that have little or no impact on their daily lives. But unemployment and financial distress do, and they’re much easier to measure.

The 2016 presidential election unearthed these deep fears. Economic anxiety was a significant deciding factor. A 2018 Oxford study found that support for Donald Trump was significantly higher in local labor markets more exposed to the adoption of robots. Counties that flipped from blue to red all coincided with areas that lost jobs. They didn’t find new ones. Today these same counties added jobs at less than half the rate of both the comparison groups and the nation as a whole.

These counties have been continually promised a future, but more frequently than not they’ve been duped, swindled, and ignored. There’s only so much patience before tempers flare. Being taken advantage of never feels good, and a lot of these people feel that Americans, their former employers, and politicians, are thriving at their expense.

It’s worth taking a moment to consider their perspective. Imagine you lost your job in 2014 to a factory overseas. All you hear about on the news is how good the economy is doing, but all you see is large corporations outsourcing jobs, while tech companies swallow up the rest of the world. It’s a bleak picture. Your friends and family all begin to suffer. As time wears on, it feels like you’re forgotten. Bills pile up and money gets thin. At first, you’re depressed. Then you’re angry. Then, on top of all this, COVID-19 happens. This might be the final card that tips the scales.

There’s no time for long term plans for new job development or reeducation. Not when you’re barely getting by. There’s one immediate remedy — money.

Money recently became America’s religion — work is it’s holy vessel. When education and healthcare costs rise unchecked, it’s unsurprising that access to money quickly becomes all that matters. Kids are more conscious of it. Older American’s stay in the workforce longer to make more of it. Every generation wants it. Most societal challenges in America can be traced back to money, or the absence of it.

Status in America is having the ability to go to college, live an enviable life on Instagram, and get a respectable job that also happens to include health insurance. Living here is expensive. Money-as-a-religion exacerbates income inequality, impairing the most vulnerable demographics.

In this framework, losing your job is crippling physically and psychologically. Anger invariably surfaces. When we're angry, we have a propensity to place blame. In the case here, Americans searched for something they could channel their anger towards. It's not very surprising what they chose.

Critical Mass
Automation is one of the scariest words Americans hear. It represents the idea that whatever job you're doing today doesn't matter and there's no guarantee you'll be able to do it tomorrow. Automation, like COVID-19, bifurcates our workforce. Either you have a job that can be done remotely, or you don’t. Either you have a job that’s safe from an algorithm, or you don’t.

Too many people fall in the “don’t” category.

The main takeaway from 2016 was that Trump won, when we should’ve realized that we had a leading indicator that Americans were not doing well economically. We judged our economy based on the boilerplate success stories of large tech companies, and ignored the evidence that Americans were in trouble. Within a few short years, more people have been impacted, and now we’re finally starting to take it seriously (arguably, it took a generational event in COVID-19 for some to start paying attention). A critical mass of Americans are no longer financially sound, and it speaks volumes that both parties have adopted policies to try and solve this issue.

For instance, in a rare showing of bipartisanship, both parties have launched campaigns against tech companies. Apple’s Cook, Amazon’s Bezos, Google’s Pichai, and Facebook’s Zuckerberg were each questioned by Democrats and Republicans. Calls for regulation on both sides of the aisle have targeted social media, mobile operating systems, e-commerce, and automation.

The number of Americans suffering has reached a critical mass, and institutions are finally paying attention. It’s been interesting to see politicians become increasingly more animated over the past four years when they talk about tech companies. Yes, some is pandering, but it’s more so an illustration of how tech entwined itself into the rest of the world. And people are quite passionate about their worldviews, which means debates around tech will only get more emotional. Just go on social media if you want examples.

As a quick aside, I would be remiss to not (briefly) touch on antitrust, regulation, and legislation. I’m uncomfortable that senators and congressmen don’t know how Facebook makes money. We need new rules for the digital world, but we don’t need people who fail to understand this new world making them. Ben Thompson and Benedict Evans each have written in detail about regulating tech, and while I don’t agree with everything they write, I deeply respect their opinions. Regulating technology involves trade-offs, and both go to great lengths to fully tease out their analysis. The failures of recent legislation show how important it is to not act hastily. Successful regulation will come from having a strong base understanding of tech, business, and macroeconomics.

Any discussion on technology (and regulation) must be devoid of emotions. Emotional dialogue is inefficient, often inaccurate, and rarely leads to meaningful progress. Financial distress exacerbates these emotional reactions. Unfortunately, articulate debates are in short supply. Just like our interest in AI.

Naturally, this explains why 33 percent of Americans are concerned about AI. Most of this stems from promises of automation obviating the need for rote work. Put another way: AI eliminates low-skilled labor.

I don’t subscribe to the sentiment that every job is going to suddenly evaporate and that people will be stuck at home without any way to work. This type of change takes time. But, that said, would you choose to become a truck driver, when at some point during your career, a computer program and an array of sensors will replace you before you can retire? I wouldn’t choose that path, and I imagine many wouldn’t either if given the choice. Yet we still have people becoming drivers! Some might be in denial, but others might have no career alternative.

Herein lies the real problem: the future of automation is obvious and inevitable. For the truck driver, it’s in the rear-view mirror — and closing in. Anxiety is building in Americans’ psyches. Yet Americans are still going into careers that have meager prospects.

If we’re going to successfully reduce the income inequality gap, then we have to get Americans into better jobs. We need to build a better system. The easiest way to give people opportunities in today’s world is to provide them with technical knowledge.

We don’t need everyone to become a coder. We don’t need to teach everyone how to be consultants or bankers either, but we do need to reevaluate how we educate people to give them the tools to thrive in this new digital economy. Specific knowledge isn’t sufficient. College graduates will have to relearn multiple times during their careers. Singular career paths are harder to find. College graduates’ skill sets should reflect this.

In physics, critical mass refers to the minimum amount of fissile material needed to maintain a nuclear chain reaction. A salient metaphor for what’s currently transpiring. The world is finally paying attention, which means it’s time to make some changes. Ones that solve the root problem.

COVID-19 created a tipping point where, for many, economic uncertainty has turned to hopelessness. They don’t see a recovery ahead. For businesses, there is an orderly process for handling this. Companies close and file for bankruptcy; there’s a definitive end. For individuals, though, there is no perception of order. The chain reaction of hopelessness is self-sustaining. The explosion of change, inevitable.

Rip the Band-Aid Off
The strongest causes need a rallying cry.

As humanity becomes more dependent upon machines, systems, and algorithms, we relinquish our ability to control our environment. We’re left despondent about our futures. What's the solution?

A Movement.

Movements unify and galvanize. Our species has rallied behind movements in multiple incarnations. First they were religious, then political, and now financial. Interestingly, the most successful responses by the federal government during COVID-19 have been financial. The same is true for automation and unemployment. Policy changes focused on minimum wages, taxes, and trade agreements. We’ve been cajoled into believing that these initiatives will solve these problems, when they actually address the symptoms.

Regardless of each policy’s effectiveness, we can agree that I wouldn’t be writing this if they had all worked. In fact, the rise of cryptocurrencies validates the current imbroglio. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that as the threat of job insecurity rises, the yearning (and promise) of financial security has risen commensurately.

A recent example is Universal Basic Income (UBI). UBI is a charged concept, especially in a country that prides itself in its consistent opposition to socialism and communism. Discussing its merits (and flaws) warrants its own essay, one that’s outside the scope of this site. We can, however, utilize a useful exercise to evaluate its effectiveness.

Politicians love to tout a particular McKinsey & Co. study professing automation will eradicate one-third of America’s jobs by 2030. They’ve asked us to imagine that dark future, and think about how our workers would cope. UBI is supposed to decrease the gap between the haves and the have nots. It’s goal is to provide families financial security, especially in the automated economy of the future.

Except this ‘future’ isn’t theoretical anymore. COVID-19 arrived, and in a snap, a virtual blizzard settled on top of the country and froze everyone in place. Nearly 40 percent of low-wage workers lost their jobs in March. More than 40 million people lost their jobs in March, April, or May. That future Andrew Yang talked about is happening now.

The U.S. government flooded markets and consumers with cash, and UBI advocates finally got their experiment they’ve clamored for.

While injecting liquidity has been seamless for the FED, stimulus check distribution has epitomized bureaucracy’s legendary lack of speed and efficiency. We don’t have the infrastructure to distribute cash efficiently let alone coherently. This explains why $1.4 billion worth of stimulus checks was sent to more than 1 million dead Americans. As the U.S. Government Accountability Office explained, “agencies have made only limited progress so far in achieving transparency and accountability goals.”

COVID-19 still is spreading, which limits the accuracy of the data gathered so far. If the stimulus does support Americans through the rest of the crisis, then that’s a positive outcome. But it’s a temporary one at that. Because even if we financially support everyone, which creates its own costs and challenges, we still don’t solve the root problem: two-thirds of Americans cannot work remotely. Which brings us back to jobs.

Knowledge workers, the ones with do-anywhere office jobs, have remained relatively untouched by job and earnings losses. Stocks rebounded to where they were in January. But poor workers, disproportionately black and latino workers, as well as younger workers, have borne the heaviest employment and earnings losses. They entered this recession with little to no savings, many saddled with heavy rents and debts. Income and job losses for them translate into a loss of demand economy-wide.

Meanwhile, tech has become even more valuable. The FT had an excellent post about the resiliency of 100 global companies during COVID-19. Unsurprisingly, 46 were tech companies; 47 were from the U.S.

So in a sense, COVID-19 really has given us the future Yang worried about. A third of Americans are unemployed, and tech companies dominate more than before.

I am unconvinced people will be fine with a bunch of tech leaders making money and mailing everyone a check.

If you have a gash in your forehead, you need stitches. Band aids help stop the initial bleeding, but they’re not a long term answer. You still have a hole in your head. It’s just hidden under a piece of cloth. We’ve layered band-aids on top of one another, concealing our wound. It's easy to say things are getting better when you can't see the injury. Stimulus checks and rallying tech stocks don’t solve tech illiteracy, job prospects, or income inequality.

By ignoring the actual root problems, we’re exacerbating each. We’ve spent too long treating symptoms without treating the cause. We’ve put band-aids on top of band-aids! And this is a critical wound!

It’s time to rip it off. All of them. It will be painful, but we’ll stop delaying our pain and start confronting it head-on. No more band-aids.

Financial policies fail because they provide short term solutions that don’t solve the long term problems. It’s time to envision the world we want to live in.

We require a new movement, one to galvanize our escape from dopamine dependency. We need something that gives us job opportunities. Ones that actually move the needle.

IT’S TIME TO LEARN
It’s hard to build when you don’t know how to use a hammer. It’s even harder when you don’t even have one. Let’s provide that toolkit.

Marc Andreessen’s legendary call to arms reinvigorated the tech community. His solution: We need to rekindle the desire to build things in this country. We have the money, we have the know-how, but we lack the desire.

The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.

And we need to separate the imperative to build these things from ideology and politics. Both sides need to contribute to building. Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building.

Our forefathers and foremothers built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build.

There are few battle cries stronger than that.

America must wake up and rebuild itself. I counter Andreessen though: I believe the desire is there, but ordinary people can’t build anymore, not when they don’t know how to use the tools of the 21st century. We’ve entrenched incumbents, we’ve catered towards corporate interests, and we’ve relinquished ownership of our lives. People don’t believe in themselves. They don’t think they can.

Movements never succeed if they’re devoid of belief. Belief is a powerful drug. We have to reskill and reeducate Americans, but more importantly, we need to give them the belief that they can learn. That they can participate in the new digital economy. The best way to build confidence is to help them learn about the parts of the world they don’t understand.

"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." — Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan wrote this in 1990, after his driver requested to ask him some “science” questions. Those questions, it turns out, were about UFOs, mind-reading, and crystals. Sagan titled the essay Why We Need to Understand Science. Sagan’s observations still ring true today — we don’t understand science, and this is manifesting in our decline.

“Ignorance of science threatens our economic well-being, our national security, and the domestic process. We must do better.”

Sagan championed the simplification of science. He argued that the smartest person in the room is the one that can explain anything to anyone. I’m certain the quotes above influenced this mentality. You have to simplify if the audience can’t understand otherwise. This means we need to provide people with the elemental building blocks.

The building blocks of the universe enable science to move humanity forward. Once people understand these blocks, creativity and ingenuity are the only things holding humanity back. The future can be so much more. We have to dare to build it.

Science is the precursor to technology. Technology underpins society, business, and capital. Science is the engine of humanity.

The challenge of the next decade is not Artificial Intelligence, but Human Intelligence. Can we retrain the workforce as knowledge workers? Information is abundant. It’s all over the Internet. It's the desire to learn that's scarce.

Instead of focusing on increasing the upper bound, we’ve tried to slow the losses. We ignore the upside.

Just as Henry Ford’s Model T led to the creation of oil and gas companies, hotels, and repair shops, other technologies like machine learning will create expansive new economies. The Model T added hundreds if not thousands of jobs across and manufacturing facilities across the United States, and spawned the vacation economy. The Model T created jobs that people still have now.

Only by working with new technologies, rather than trying to thwart them, can we gain the best of what they have to offer. Technology obsoletes jobs, but there is no upper bound on the number of technology jobs themselves. We’re dealing with a temporal displacement, not a permanent one.

The problems of today were caused by yesterday’s technological successes, and the technological solutions to today’s problems will cause the problems of tomorrow. We have to continue innovating, or else we risk obviating our future.

It is stunning to me to think that more change has happened in my lifetime than happened from 3700BC to 800BC, or in any of those other periods. It’s not surprising we haven’t been able to keep up.

The assembly line unlocked the mass production of the car. Educating Americans on technology will unlock a mass generation of ideas. And the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in Americans, they’ve just been constrained by their knowledge.

Andreessen laid the foundation, and now we can build a movement to uplift and invigorate. It’s our job to catapult these ideas outwards and see them catch fire in the minds of Americans. Success is dependent upon belief reaching critical mass. Fortunately, this is something technology facilitates quite well!

This essay isn't really about coding. It's about our understanding of the world. A little bit of ignorance doesn't harm you, but there’s a reason we teach people to drive before they get a driver’s license. Technology creates leverage, and this has consequences, both good and bad. So instead of trying to wrestle with something we don’t understand, let’s become educated. We will place Americans into the jobs of the future, while we obtain a clearer understanding of where we are going.

Technology destroys jobs and replaces them with opportunities. Let us provide everyone with these opportunities.

Action Items
Here’s how we do that:

1. (Re)Build

2. (Re)Unite

3. (Re)Ignite

4. (Re)Learn

5. (Re)Train

B-U-I-L-T.

If you read the About or Welcome to Olympus posts, you’ll understand that I value the meaning behind names, symbols, and acronyms. Aside from their intellectual value, these meanings are functional. Acronyms help us remember. Let’s unpack this one.

Names carry weight. BUILT invokes Andreessen’s rallying cry while distinguishing itself with separate actions. There is a reason for its past-tense. The tense emphasizes fundamental and everlasting principles. Work must be done.

Now — let’s address the (Re) prefix. None of these verbs are new. America has a rich history of building, uniting, igniting, learning, and training humans. These verbs represent the quintessential America — maybe not explicitly, but in spirit. Belief is a force-multiplier. By acknowledging that America successfully embodied these traits in the past, we instill confidence that we can do this again. It also forces us to recognize our past. Whether you like the America of 2020 or not, it’s hard to have a vision for the future if you don’t know the America of 1776, 1861, 1929, 1963, and 2001. BUILT embodies the vision of America.

And so, BUILT stands atop three foundations: the mnemonic aide, the invocation of the American vision, and the actual actions themselves. Together, I hope they catalyze reflection and action.

The pandemic gave us a chance to take a step back and think about what’s possible. We get to see our deficiencies, vulnerabilities, and failings. They lie naked, exposed to our critical eye. No weakness can hide in this environment. COVID-19 is the light that keeps shining, exposing the dust. We’re smoking everything out.

But this is good. Because we can’t deny they exist anymore.

COVID-19 also showed what works. The simple fact a third of American workers were able to continue working remotely is a testament to the Internet. Without the Internet, broadband, and the needed software, social distancing would have been impossible.

Like COVID-19, BUILT identifies our strengths, and hones them against our problems. America struggles with disparity in knowledge, wealth, and leadership. Limited knowledge inhibits Americans opportunities. Diminished opportunities centralize wealth. Centralized wealth engenders systems that regress society. Systems that promote soaring healthcare costs, a student debt crisis, and the continuance of racism.

The world is complicated, so it’s impossible to identify a singular reason why all this happened, but Ben Thompson’s observations on the Internet resonate:

Count me with those who believe the Internet is on par with the industrial revolution, the full impact of which stretched over centuries. And it wasn’t all good. Like today, the industrial revolution included a period of time that saw many lose their jobs and a massive surge in inequality. It also lifted millions of others out of sustenance farming. Then again, it also propagated slavery, particularly in North America. The industrial revolution led to new monetary systems, and it created robber barons. Modern democracies sprouted from the industrial revolution, and so did fascism and communism. The quality of life of millions and millions was unimaginably improved, and millions and millions died in two unimaginably terrible wars.

Change is guaranteed, but the type of change is not; never is that more true than today. See, friction makes everything harder, both the good we can do, but also the unimaginably terrible. In our zeal to reduce friction and our eagerness to celebrate the good, we ought not lose sight of the potential bad.

We are creating the future, and “better” does not win by default.

2020’s tumultuous first six months echo the final line. Things are broken. People are suffering. But(!) we have a say in what happens next.

The future isn’t preordained. This vision is attainable. We have to roll up our sleeves and do the work.

(Re)Build
If you drive on any highway in the U.S. you know there’s a lot of work to do.

American infrastructure is rated a D+. America has 50 million people unemployed right now. Both of these problems can solve each other.

U.S. infrastructure is older than it’s ever been. All those infrastructure projects we've put off? Do them now. Doesn't matter if they turn a four-lane highway into one lane — nobody is travelling during rush hour!

Let's fix it. Let’s physically rebuild America.

We have 25+% unemployment, which means we have ample people who can be employed for these projects. Give everyone a mask, take their temperature each shift, and give people who'd otherwise be stuck at home something to do. Milan's doing it.

There’s also a proven playbook. The New Deal gave Americans jobs during the Great Depression. It also modernized our infrastructure. These same initiatives would yield similar results today. But we don’t need to stop there.

Let's future-proof America too. Let’s build cities with tomorrow's assumptions:

• Ghost Kitchens

• Drone warehouse hubs

• Self-driving vehicle lanes

• Energy efficient buildings

• Bio-sensors to monitor air quality

We can build with imagination instead of tradition. Andreessen made a similar observation:

When the producers of HBO’s Westworld wanted to portray the American city of the future, they didn’t film in Seattle or Los Angeles or Austin — they went to Singapore.

The cities of the future already exist. All we have to do now is build our own.

(Re)Unite
Great leaders bring groups of people together to achieve extraordinary things. Regardless of their backgrounds, they combine strengths and stifle strife.

When America succeeds, we triumph united against a common foe. We still have enemies, but they’ve become our compatriots.

America lacks an institution that forces people from all walks of life — urban and rural, rich and poor, black and white — to come together and work as a team toward a common goal. It’s impossible to build cities of the future when you view most of the country as “other people.”

Humans have always been tribal, but conflict was constrained by physical proximity. The Internet places us in the same room. Being confined triggers conflict. The virality of social media exacerbates it.

When people are so heavily divided, it’s hard to find things to orient our country with. Look no further than COVID-19. Every aspect of the pandemic has been politicized, from masks to travel bans.

The American melting pot is burning instead of melting.

It is impossible to build a better future without uniting together. Rebuilding our infrastructure will initiate this movement, but the U.S. must do more. Solving social problems is a lot easier when everyone is aware they exist. COVID-19 started shining the light, and we must continue exposing what doesn’t work.

Compulsory national service is one way to achieve this. It would iterate upon (Re)Build, offering infrastructure, national park, and child care work. And more. This essay is the best exploration on the topic I’ve seen. Americans would interact with new people, gain new skills, and develop empathy for their neighbors, all while upgrading America.

We also need to upgrade leadership. As I mentioned, America has triumphed in the face of darkness before — frequently due to leaders rising to the challenge. The difference today is that new leaders aren’t getting that opportunity. The ones that have are performing. Every institution ought to let promising stars lead.

Finally, great leaders create external opposition to unite and motivate. They generate competition and mobilize resources. The virus was one enemy, but it lacks a physicality. There are other entities to compete against, even in amicable manner. Why not strive to beat Western countries in flattening the curve? Or in modernizing infrastructure? Or adopting renewable resources?

The Manhattan Project and the Space Race prove we can do this. A clearly-identifiable enemy fueled these movements. COVID-19 should become this generation’s Sputnik.

Let's create our own opposition, evaluate ourselves, and compete. In the meantime we’ll come together, and set our sights higher.

(Re)Ignite
America didn't suddenly walk on the moon. We wrote, dreamt, and obsessed about it. Soon after, we planted our flag on lunar soil.

If you watched the SpaceX launch earlier this year, you saw firsthand the power of aiming for the stars. This comment tells you all you need to know about its impact:

15 year old from Africa here who have dreams of becoming one of you😭

The boldest futures belong to those who motivate the rest of us to go there. Embracing these visions, as this teenager has, is how we collectively get there.

Thinking about the future lets us contemplate the benefits & downsides to new technologies. We shouldn’t blindly embrace change, but we also can’t expect things to remain the same.

We need to be honest with ourselves. How do we line up to our expectations? I'm crestfallen we have faltered so much with COVID-19. But this is the slap in the face we need. Doused in ice water, it's time to swim, not complain about the cold.

Large swaths of Americans fetishize our shortcomings. Reveling in our deficiencies, they bemoan without recognizing our strengths or outlining ways to solve them. They're beholden to their beliefs, but we don't need to broadcast their voices anymore. Reserve that right for the people who inspire, plan, and execute. Welcome constructive criticism and feedback, but only if it’s framed productively. Highlight problems, and suggest solutions.

World War I was so devastating because generals used previous wars’ tactics in the new world’s warfare. America (and much of the globe), is on that same path. This is the first inning of the Internet. It's not too early to evaluate our progress though. Increasingly, America falls short of its lofty expectations. That means we need to re-establish our vision — reinvigorate ourselves.

Dream bigger. Promote action. Foster imagination. Embrace the future.

Visions start from the top. America’s next leaders should provide their visions. Vanderbilt and Rockefeller envisioned an America connected by steel. Tomorrow’s leaders see the same thing, except digital.

The biggest VC-backed companies in the last decade reflect our lack of vision. They revolve around personal comforts. “Drive me here. Bring me food. Find me an apartment for a week.” Comfort and convenience. Undeniably valuable, but invariably uninspiring.

Light the rockets then. Shine lights on complicated problems. Craft a solution, built it, test it, repeat it. Like the Dragon rocket launch: a slow, building burn, a hint of lift, then the rise from the Earth and ascension to the stars.

We know how to do this for rockets. Time to turn to other challenges.

Humanity has accelerated rapidly, but some industries have been left behind. At the beginning of the year I analyzed industries that still need to be modernized: namely healthcare, education, and finance. The pandemic has heightened our focus on all three. Financially, we struggled to distribute relief to those who needed it. Virtual classrooms exposed the country’s variance in education levels. Rain ponchos became substitutes for proper medical equipment and the healthcare system experienced its own version of the Global Financial Crisis. Healthcare startups have seen historic fundraising, and fintech has been gaining momentum throughout 2020, but education still hasn’t been solved. Unfortunately, the responses to COVID-19 by schools, colleges, and universities are underwhelming. Pre-recorded Zoom classes won’t fix these problems.

America was built on a vision of improvement — a delineation from the status quo. We've become comfortable. America does not have a monopoly on innovation, but its aspirations are unchallenged. The world is full of people dreaming about making the future. Just like that teenager in Africa, we give them a destination for their goals. Let's continue this. If you don't want to participate, that's fine. That teenager in Africa is more than happy to fill that spot.

Children’s imaginations are America’s energy source. Cultivating it will revitalize our nation, and the best way is to teach it.

(Re)Learn
The more I think about this essay’s title, the more I wonder what the world would look like.

Would Americans be better off if they all knew how to code? Or would it be more of the same? There’s actually a pretty good answer, and it involves math.

Every American learns math, but few feel comfortable using it. Even fewer have proficient literacy. Most students’ access to quality instruction is poor at best.

You could easily switch the title of this essay to what if everyone knew math? On its face not a lot would change. People struggle to manage numbers, and if our general response to the pandemic early on is any indication, we are very poor at understanding how the compounding effect works. What if everyone fully understood math though? What if everyone knew the bare minimum that they could grok any complex discussion about physics equations or pathogen virality?

The problem isn't so much requiring that people learn math, or learn how to code, but rather we do such a poor job of teaching it. The same is true for technology! Except — we don’t even have the courses. Only 45 percent of U.S. public schools teach computer science.

Fortunately, you don't have to learn in your school. You are not constrained by physical proximity. Education has begun to be digitized, and soon world-class courses will be available for any student on any topic. The best teachers will teach thousands of students.

We need to establish a way to elucidate Americans so that everyone has the knowledge and tools needed to live in the Internet Age. Coding promotes logical thinking in a different way than math or the other sciences. Highly logical thinking is increasingly important as the world is getting more and more complex. Adding coding and computing lessons in high schools is more than necessary, it is a moral obligation. Every student should be taught how to code — even if they have no intention of working in the space. We make the very same argument about math, writing, and reading.

Becoming a digitally literate nation is a worthy goal. It shouldn’t even cost that much because most of this can be delivered through computers, tablets or phones.

Every adult who has 6-8 weeks to kill should be taking MOOCs, coding classes, or learn some type of digital skill. For tourism countries, it’s a good time to retrain workers and teach them tech skills. Schools have already let go of more workers than they did during the Great Recession, with nearly 500,000 positions lost. Many of them could help create a new curriculum and teach it!

One of the most damaging and widespread social beliefs is the idea that most adults are incapable of learning new skills. Even today, what to study and how to study it are more important than where to study it and for how long. The best teachers are on the Internet. The best books are on the Internet. The best peers are on the Internet. The tools for learning are abundant. It’s never been easier to learn, no matter your age, intellect, or circumstances. The only thing that matters is your desire. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.

Learning is a skill. The more you exercise it, the easier it becomes. It's a mental battle more than anything else; 95 percent of the desired skills in the world can be learned on the internet. The majority can be found and learned for free. Why wait when you already know what to do? The key is discipline. Can you commit every day? This is hard.

We cannot mobilize our workforce without getting them up to speed. There won't be a magical switch, but we can increase the momentum of our advancements by ramping up investments in re-purposing education. And we know it works.

Investing in education can greatly narrow the inequality gap. Just one additional year of school can:

• Raise a person’s income by up to 10%

• Raise average annual GDP growth by 0.37%

• Reduce the probability of motherhood by 7.3%

• Reduce the likelihood of child marriage by >5 percentage points

The dichotomy between the Haves and Have Nots is clear for all to see.

This isn’t just about learning about what matters now, it’s about upgrading our mindset that education stops after graduation. Because moving forward, we can’t afford to stop learning. So let’s make it a habit now, before it’s too late.

(Re)Train
By the time we teach everyone what they need to know, the world will have already changed and we will have to update what we need to know. And by the time we have adapted, the world will have changed again.

At the center of every significant change in our lives is a technology of some sort. Technology is humanity’s accelerant. Which means that change is also accelerating.

As a blacksmith in colonial America, you only had to learn your job once. Most of the time, this came in the form of an apprenticeship that lasted a few years. Today, your job might change five times in that same time frame. Which means that we have to continuously reskill in order to stay relevant. Some jobs won't be altered as fast as others, but by the end of this century, just like the previous ones before it, work will look entirely different.

As I've mentioned, there's a lot of anxiety about this transition. Instead, we should look at it as an opportunity to elevate what we do for a living. If you asked an American if they'd rather be working 14 hours a day as a sustenance farmer, I’d wager that they'd rather be working 8-hour days as an accountant. It wouldn't be enthralling necessarily, but it'd be far better than the alternative. Similarly, if you had talked to a blacksmith centuries ago about what they're ideal job would be, they wouldn't be able to tell you they want to be a software engineer. They have no concept of what that it or how it’d be possible. The world changes.

The same rings truer today. We don't know what the jobs of the future will be, only that the requirements for them will change frequently during our lifetimes. That means that we have to retrain ourselves throughout our lives in order to succeed.

Again, this is an opportunity. Our ancestors weren't able to pursue 5+ careers in their lifetime. Instead they were funneled to a specific role that usually lasted their entire life. Interestingly, the future more closely resembles the lifestyle of Ancient Greeks. There, life progressed in an ark, where your role to society changed as you grew older. That dynamic variation carries a lively cadence that would serve us well today.

The best way to get there, is to embrace change and most importantly, to embrace automation. It is, after all, the common feature of human progress. We don’t hand-sew our own clothes anymore. Nor do we plant seeds one by one. We have always automated, and every time we’ve worried about job security.

Our ancestors couldn’t learn new skills nearly as quickly. They didn’t have limitless access to knowledge like we do. So while it is true we are on the precipice of an Automation Acceleration thanks to robotics and artificial intelligence, we also stand before the Digital Library of Alexandria. Quite an opportunity.

Not only to reskill, but to elevate economic opportunity too. We already saw how lucrative technology careers have been, and we know we’re in the first inning of the Internet. So why not begin learning how to swing? There’s plenty of time to get on base, or even hit a home run.

Shahin Farshchi, a scientist-turned-investor, put it best:

The industrial revolution moved jobs from the fields into the factories. Computers and machines took jobs away from factories and behind desks in engineering and the sciences. AI is going to automate what’s left of lots of manual and skilled work, and our current workforce needs to be constantly refreshed and prepared for the changing workplace…

Robotics and AI will generate far more high-quality jobs than the onerous tasks it will render obsolete…

Politically, corporately and socially, we are overlooking automation and education as powerful catalysts behind shaping future jobs.

Shahin describes automation as an Archimedes Lever. A lever to increase our productivity as a country, but also a way to replace low-quality jobs with high-quality ones.

Instead: emphasize opportunity for better-paying, higher-quality jobs through a skilled workforce partnered with automation, and allay the fears of those who are anxious about the future of work.

Instead of trying to outpace machines, why not work with them to become something better? Chess players have a name to describe this marriage of man and machine: a Centaur.

Automation is in a pre-Renaissance moment — we can be its most successful artists. Now we need to find our paint, brushes, and canvas.

Technology moves too quickly for our education system to adequately prepare students for the skills they’ll need in their careers. As a result, companies are going to take the initiative. More companies will offer reskilling initiatives so that they can prepare and improve their workforce.

I envision some companies will strive to retain employees for life, and have the appropriate perks and opportunities to encourage that. It’s not unrealistic to imagine someone changing careers multiple times all while working at Google. They begin their career by working in Google’s finance team. They learn how to code from one of the best tech companies in the world, and then become a software engineer. After a few years, they might combine the two skill sets and switch to a sales analytics role.

I’m most interested in seeing how job requirements change, and how companies identify talent accordingly. Will companies resort to a two or three-year analyst program, where each cohort is continually evaluated? Perhaps only a percentage “graduate” to full time. Or maybe companies could host week-long courses where they can measure students’ abilities. Group interviews already exist; some companies will experiment with modifications to the format, focusing on finding people who are committed to the company‘s vision, show a propensity for learning quickly, and work well with other people.

There’s a lot of different opportunities for future generations and the companies that take the longer-term view and focus on their employees will succeed.

Society will shift towards emphasizing the ability to continuously learn new skills while traditional education will mold itself around a more appropriate model based on today’s world. Some countries (and companies), will do better than others. Those that do this sooner will rapidly outpace their peers.

Similar to how COVID-19 is exposing certain countries’ lack of preparedness and also showing best practices for how to handle pandemics, the future job market will be one of the biggest determinants of future countries’ prosperity and success. The countries that succeed quickly will attract the best talent, people, and jobs. There will be a heightened awareness on long-term focus towards enhancing employee experiences. If companies are focused on retraining their employees, they’re going to be even more expensive to replace. Fierce rivalries will develop among competitors, and in a way companies could begin to resemble different sports teams and franchises.

The pandemic will end. What jobs do we want to return to?

Practice Exam
To summarize:

1. (Re)Build: Bridge the gap

2. (Re)Unite: Get on the same page

3. (Re)Ignite: Dream about the future

4. (Re)Learn: Gather the skills needed to go there

5. (Re)Train: Experiment, iterate, and automate what we can

Good ideas rearrange the world in ways that make the things in it more valuable. BUILT is the beginning of my contribution to seeing positive change.

The past few months have been horrible. But considering everything that could have happened, we need to recognize that this was the best test we could have taken. Imagine if COVID-19’s mortality rate for children was high.

Millions are suffering right now, and millions have been suffering long before COVID-19. If we don’t take time for this self reflection, then this pandemic will ‘go to waste.’ Our actions have consequences, not only for the immediate fight and eventual recovery, but for decades to come. If we don’t address these deficiencies now, then this will worsen, even after the crisis. But this isn’t the final, and we have time to learn from mistakes, study, and get ready for the next test, because it will eventually come.

Practice exams don’t give you the answers for the real test, but they let you see if you’re going in the right direction. No one has all the answers, but it’s time we start trying some. Otherwise, we’ll never measure how well they work.

We received the clearest indication of an inflection point. The trillion dollar question is, which way will we go?

Life is filled with tests. COVID-19 is a rare case where we got answers to the next one. Some answers will work better than others, and some might not be that useful at all, but we have a general sense of direction. All that matters is if we choose to follow it.

The Great Reconstruction
Hopefully, COVID-19 will do for society what a near-death experience can do for a person: help us realize what’s important and what’s not.

America just turned 244 years old. This country has seen darkness beyond most of our comprehension, and yet we’ve prevailed. We’ve faltered and had our share of missteps, but we move in the right direction. Every time we’ve been at the brink, we find a way. This is one of those moments. This is an opportunity for us to rise to the occasion.

We’ve seen five years of digitalization in five months.

There are two paths forward, and we must choose. Will we travel down the route of dwindling success and disunity, or will we adopt the path of global recalibration and solidarity? Do we remain short-sighted or do we expand our time-horizon?

If we choose the former, this will not only prolong the pandemic, but will probably result in even worse catastrophes in the future. If we choose recalibration, it will be a victory not only against the coronavirus, but also against future crises that will assail humankind in the 21st century.

COVID-19 provides a useful time for reflection. Do we continue ahead on the path we’re on, or do we learn and correct our course? COVID-19 will accelerate what was already happening: The digitization of the world economy, the reconfiguration of work, and the reconstruction of healthcare and education. These changes may have originally taken a decade or two, but now the timelines are compressed.

Our challenges are also accelerating though. Job prospects are increasing for knowledge workers as companies begin to use global talent pools, but this ossifies prospects for people without these skills. Network effects entrench large companies, which avoid traditional antitrust regulation. Digital infrastructure lies exposed, while physical infrastructure remains archaic and vulnerable. There are plenty of problems to address once the pandemic is over, all of which require us to reconstruct institutions and assumptions.

There is a bright path forward where we solve these challenges. The opening of this essay attempts to visualize that path. How would the world look? If this is a world we desire to live in, how do we get there? It’s by no means a short path, but it’s attainable, and if executed, will be marked as a triumphant moment in history.

A continuously trained workforce, coupled with a culture of entrepreneurship to invent and disseminate new technology, will cultivate a future where nobody is left behind. A future everyone feels confident about. A future we are empowered to create.

My hope is that in this future, when Americans look back at this decade, they’ll say we rose to the challenge.

Darwin’s Prophecy

“Technology is not only the thing that moves the human race forward, but it’s the only thing that ever has. Without technology, we’re just monkeys playing in the dirt.” — Naval Ravikant

Technology transformed the world, and it’s not going to stop doing so. Humanity farmed for millennia until all of a sudden, there was this vertical takeoff a few hundred years ago. Our trajectory as a species went celestial. We went from worshiping the stars to walking on the moon.

We have the potential over the next century to profoundly advance the quality of life for virtually everybody. Technology is the lever humanity uses to take natural resources and make something better out of them.

I'm bullish on the future of humanity. Yet, our current trajectory is disheartening. Too few understand how the world is changing, and this leaves us ill-suited and under-prepared for the new world we're facing.

We control our future, but right now we're blinded by inhibitions. No one voluntarily drives in a blizzard without a windshield. Let alone without windshield wipers. And yet, here we are attempting to navigate the flurries of social media, automation, and broader tech illiteracy.

We don't have to drive blind. If we don’t allow more people to participate in these changes, we’re going to be dealing with a two-sided battle. Compounding inequality and the absence of preparation.

This is trying to get people to go up Mount Everest without ever having introduced them to hiking. It's hard to identify another example similar in magnitude where we’ve set people up for failure. This lack of preparation must change.

And so we have to first get people caught up with where the world is. Then we need to get them to consider where the world is going. If we can't understand what's happening now, we’re outmatched by tomorrow's problems.

We’re seeing an example now: COVID-19 demolished the world. People knew this was going to happen. They warned us and the world still wasn't ready. We weren't thinking about what's going to happen tomorrow because we’ve been short-sighted.

Mass unemployment, massive inequality, and the absence of coherent plans to fight these challenges, all existed before COVID-19. The pandemic exacerbated each one. They’ve been festering prior to the pandemic, but not enough people cared.

It’s hard to teach math and science in school because they contain intangible concepts and high barriers for understanding. You can't see negative numbers. By contrast, there’s no reason we can’t teach people about the problems above, because they’re tangible and persistent. This extends to technology. There are aspects of technology that are invisible, but much of it is tangible! We just need to redevelop how we learn about it. There’s nothing overly complicated about how technology works, we just haven’t given people the right tools to understand it.

Technology is intimately infused in our lives. It's troubling people don't grasp it. Part of the blame falls on those who understand it, because we haven’t done a sufficient job informing the rest of us. This can change. The value of understanding technology is that it touches all parts of the world. A disciple of technology inevitably learns about the world. Being more informed is a path to understanding. Because it’s so omnipresent, once people start understanding tech, they'll only gain further of an understanding of the long-term challenges and opportunities it brings.

There’s no switch or lever to pull. This shift will take time and multiple iterations. Efforts compound over time though, and if sustained, we’ll see stark improvement. Humanity has undergone multiple incarnations of itself since we wandered as hunter gatherers. We’ve never been the strongest species nor the most energy efficient, but we have been the most innovative.

Steve Jobs had a famous aphorism that the computer was the bicycle of the mind. Meaning, that compared to other animals, humans weren’t that special. Our tools changed that. Tools aren’t something we can immediately use — we have to learn and practice first to reach proficiency.

We’ve successfully given everyone a bicycle over the past decade, now all we need to do is teach people how to ride it.

I’ll give Darwin the final word.

“It is not the strongest of species that survive; nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the most adaptable to change.” — Charles Darwin

As always, please reach out via email or Twitter with your thoughts. If this resonated with you, I ask that you help spread the message.

Acknowledgements:
This took a while to write. This wouldn’t have been possible without the help, advice, and inspiration from the following:

Naval R; Balaji S; Shahin F; Tyler C; Marc A; Anton L; Trevor N; Matt R; Mike M; Josh W; Hunter G; Ben T; Morgan H; Kevin K; Eric W; Joe W.

And more… directly and indirectly.