A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology.
The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.
Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.
When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.
Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.
A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.
Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.
In a unanimous verdict, the jury in Oakland, California federal court said Musk had brought his case too late.Listen (4 mins)
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Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, was a co-founder of OpenAI, which launched in 2015 and went on to create ChatGPT [File: Manuel Orbegozo/Reuters]
By AP and Reuters
Published On 18 May 2026
A United States jury has ruled against Elon Musk in his lawsuit against OpenAI, finding the artificial intelligence (AI) company not liable to the world’s richest person for having allegedly strayed from its original mission to benefit humanity.
In a unanimous verdict on Monday, the jury in Oakland, California US federal court said Musk had brought his case too late. The jury deliberated for less than two hours.
The trial had widely been seen as a critical moment for the future of OpenAI and AI generally, both in how it should be used and who should benefit from it.
Following the verdict, Musk’s lawyer said he reserved the right to appeal, but the judge suggested he may have an uphill battle because whether the statute of limitations ran out before Musk sued was a factual issue.
“There’s a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury’s finding, which is why I was prepared to dismiss on the spot,” US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said.
Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI, the company that launched in 2015 and went on to create ChatGPT. After investing $38m in its first years, Musk in 2024 accused OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his top deputy of shifting into a moneymaking mode behind his back.
The trial that began April 27 shed light on the bitter falling-out between the two Silicon Valley titans and the beginnings of OpenAI, now a company valued at $852bn and moving towards potentially one of the largest initial public offerings in history.
Altman and OpenAI claimed there was never a promise to keep OpenAI a nonprofit forever. In fact, they argued, Musk knew this and filed his lawsuit because he couldn’t have unilateral control over the fast-growing AI developer.
Repeated attacks
Musk was seeking damages to be paid to the altruistic efforts of OpenAI’s charitable arm as well as Altman’s ouster from OpenAI’s board. Musk’s decision to stop funding the company contributed to a bitter rift between the former allies. Musk says he was responding to deceptive conduct that OpenAI’s board picked up on when it fired Altman as CEO in 2023 before he got his job back days later.
The verdict followed 11 days of testimony and arguments where Musk’s and Altman’s credibility came under repeated attack.
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Each side accused the other of being more interested in money than serving the public.
In his closing argument, Musk’s lawyer Steven Molo reminded jurors that several witnesses questioned Altman’s candor or branded him a liar, and that Musk did not give an unqualified “yes” when asked during the trial if he was completely trustworthy.
“Sam Altman’s credibility is directly at issue,” Molo said. “If you don’t believe him, they cannot win.”
Musk accused OpenAI of wrongfully trying to enrich investors and insiders at the nonprofit’s expense, and failing to prioritise AI’s safety. He also contended that Microsoft knew all along that OpenAI cared more about money than being altruistic.
OpenAI countered that it was Musk who saw dollar signs, and that he waited too long to claim OpenAI breached its founding agreement to build safe artificial intelligence to benefit humanity.
“Mr Musk may have the Midas touch in some areas, but not in AI,” William Savitt, a lawyer for OpenAI, said in his closing argument.
OpenAI competes with AI companies such as Anthropic and xAI. Microsoft has spent more than $100bn on its partnership with OpenAI, a Microsoft executive testified.
Musk’s xAI is now part of his space and rocket company SpaceX, which is preparing an IPO that could exceed OpenAI’s in size.
Nobody believed her the first time. Nobody believed her the second time. But Echo wasn’t moving. On a Tuesday morning in March 2019, K-9 Echo — a Rottweiler with the Memphis Police Department — was doing a routine check on a school bus. Forty-three elementary school children were waiting to board. Echo alerted at the rear compartment. Her handler, Officer Calvin Bridges, checked it. Nothing visible. He cleared it. Echo alerted again. He cleared it again. Then she did something she had never done in five years of working together. She walked to the door of that bus and sat down. She would not move. Officer Bridges had a choice — trust what his eyes saw, or trust his dog. He chose his dog. He pulled the driver aside. He got every single child off that bus. When he opened the rear compartment fully and removed a hidden false panel built into the bus itself, he found eleven kilograms of methamphetamine — packed tight, sealed, and treated with a special compound designed to hide the smell. It had blocked 80% of the scent. Echo found it anyway. At the trial, Officer Bridges was asked why he pulled those children off the bus. His answer was simple. “Because she sat down. In five years, she had never sat down like that. I trust my dog. I will always trust my dog.” The bus driver was convicted. The trafficking network behind the shipment was taken apart over the following year — fourteen arrests, seven convictions. Echo received the department’s Distinguished Service Award. She stood on the podium. She got a treat. She ate it. Then she looked at Bridges — ready to go back to work. Some dogs bark to warn you. Echo just sat down. And forty-three children went home that afternoon. AZ Kris
Iran has formally created a new government body to manage the Strait of Hormuz: the Persian Gulf Strait Authority. – The PGSA just launched its official X account, promising real-time updates on Strait operations – It was announced by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council – Iran is now institutionalizing its control over the world’s most important oil chokepoint Tehran is not just blockading the Strait. It is building a bureaucracy to run it. Source: Al Jazeera
Today, we look the scale of Russia’s losses in Ukraine, learn about a fresh Ebola outbreak in sub-Saharan Africa, and report on Spain’s Socialists suffering on the seaside.
Thanks for reading,
– The Daily Crew
Russian President Vladimir Putinheads to China this week to meet his counterpart Xi Jinping. Under the leadership of these two men, who have met dozens of times, Russia and China have forged what they call a “no limits” partnership. Russia is a major source of natural resources for China, while Beijing has helped Moscow weather increasingly harsh Western sanctions and technology restrictions triggered by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
That conflict will certainly be on the agenda for the two leaders, especially as the costs for Putin mount while the gains start to evaporate.
On the ground, Russia has begun to lose territory regularly for the first time in nearly three years. Meanwhile, Putin’s economy is struggling: after an initial war-related production boost, Russia is now suffering labor shortages, inflation, and rising deficits. Even the recent oil-price spike resulting from the Iran war hasn’t been much help: Moscow last week cut its economic growth forecast for this year from 1.3% to 0.4%.
But the true cost for Russia is human: Russia’s battlefield losses in Ukraine since 2022 are staggering. As many as 350,000 Russian troops have been killed, according to an estimate by the exiled Russian media outlets Meduza and Mediazona. The total number of Russia’s dead, wounded, and missing likely exceeds a million.
In fact, as the graphic truth above shows, Russian fatalities in Ukraine surpass all combat-related deaths suffered by the US in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and Russia’s post-Soviet wars in Chechnya – combined.
Yes, you read that right: combined.This is Moscow’s deadliest military engagement since World War II, when the Soviet Union lost tens of millions of people.
And yet the conflict drags on. Putin still believes he can take more land in order to “raise the price” at eventual peace talks. Ukraine, undaunted after more than four years of full-scale defensive war – during which it has itself suffered up to 140,000 deaths – refuses to cede territory or agree to a shaky peace.
As Putin heads east for talks with his biggest external backers in Beijing, there seems little prospect of an end to the fighting, or the death toll, in Ukraine.
EXCLUSIVE: An hour in the Oval Office with the CEO-in-Chief, President Trump
In a wide-ranging interview, Trump explains how the Iran war could delay his interest-rate plans, why he regrets asking for only 10% of Intel, and what will happen to America’s dealmaking empire when his term is over.
Trump has concentrated economic decision-making in his own hands like no other president.Courtesy of The White House
President Trump can’t believe Jensen Huang doesn’t own his own plane.
Hours before he departs for his highly anticipated China summit, the president has been arranging for the billionaire cofounder of Nvidia to join the who’s who of Fortune 500 CEOs preparing to travel to Beijing. Also in the group are Citigroup’s Jane Fraser, arguably the most powerful woman in finance, and Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who recently gave the president an honorary (if slightly tongue-in-cheek) “Salesman of the Year” award for helping the jetmaker sell hundreds of planes.
Huang is a late but welcome addition to the party. For one of America’s most successful CEOs and the man whose company’s chips power the AI boom, the president is happy to make room, and Huang winds up hitching a ride aboard Air Force One, sharing the jet with Elon Musk, among others. The only reason Huang wasn’t included earlier is because he didn’t call to ask.
As I sit across the Resolute Desk from the president in the Oval Office while we talk about his upcoming trip, it’s clear that arrangements like this are exactly the kind of deal the president likes to make—quick, informal, and one in which he can declare himself a clear winner. He prides himself on his ability to get anyone on the phone and achieve measurable results, whether he’s talking with a world leader or an American company he wants to help.
In a wide-ranging conversation that spanned an hour—and covered topics from tariffs to AI data centers to the war in Iran—the president outlined the broader, top-down dealmaking mentality he’s using to try to reinvigorate the American economy. (A small group of Fortune Media executives joined us in Trump’s office; they did not take part in the interview.)
With the help of Wall Street–savvy cabinet members like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Trump has turned old economic norms on their head. The president has been an evangelist for a healthy mix of new revenue streams generated by global tariffs and strategic equity investments, alongside trade megadeals designed to lure foreign investment back into the U.S. Trump’s twin goals: ending the trade imbalances that he argues have weakened America, and offsetting the ever-rising national debt.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang (top) and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk (bottom center) joined Trump (lower left) on Air Force One en route to a Beijing summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in May.
Past presidents and Congresses, stuck in partisan gridlock, haven’t been able to deliver on these fronts. Trump’s response has been, essentially, to either steamroll or outright ignore the politicos and regulators. It’s a fast-paced one-man show that thrills his fans and makes his detractors sound the alarm on the ethics and the legality of it all.
“I make one of those deals every day that no normal person would make,” Trump says, while telling me about a possible railroad merger that he would want the government to have equity in. Musing on stakes his administration has claimed in companies like Intel and U.S. Steel, he continues, “Some people actually think it’s un-American, what I do. They say, ‘You’re taking their company away.’ ” Those critics aren’t seeing the big picture, he implies; after all, “We have $38 trillion in debt.”
Where the chips fall as a result of all this unorthodoxy—including the long-term, geopolitical reshuffling of alliances and partnerships it’s invoking—is still very much in question. There are enough proof points to suggest that the strategy has some merit, at least under a leader as forceful as Trump. U.S. stocks and corporate profits are showing surprising resiliency, reaching new highs this year—despite the inflation-driving Iran war “detour,” as President Trump likes to call it. The broader public is less convinced: Consumer confidence hit an all-time low in April, and approval of Trump’s management of the economy has plummeted in polls.
Even the bulls, however, have to grapple with some questions about the future. As any executive knows, no sturdy business can be built on the shoulders of a single person. So what will happen when the CEO-in-chief, who’s literally and figuratively remaking the White House, no longer lives there?
Inside Trump’s dealmaking mindset, via the Lincoln Memorial
When our conversation begins, the deal President Trump is most excited to talk about isn’t with Iran, or even with Chinese President Xi Jinping. It involves the iconic Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which has been leaking and, he says, plaguing the otherwise beautiful National Mall.
“It’s been a disaster ever since it’s been built, because they put granite blocks there, and every stone is going to leak,” he tells me, saying the pool has become almost like a “garbage can.” The plan he says he was pitched to resurrect it would have cost roughly $350 million and taken four years to complete. Instead, Trump says, he found a fix that will cost significantly less. By treating the structure like one of his resort swimming pools—and using a contractor who worked on one of those pools—Trump figures he can keep the granite base, drop in a sturdy, leakproof shell, and voilà: problem solved.
Now, as Trump shows me a dozen images of the project underway, he’s on to which shade the shell should be—American flag blue? Or something darker to hide debris?
The president, of course, first established himself in real estate, and ideas about property keep popping up as we talk. A question about the AI race prompts Trump to recall visiting a vast data center with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “The Pentagon was always the biggest building ever built,” he marvels. “That’s like a toy by comparison. These are the biggest buildings that anybody’s ever even envisioned.” (Trump now calls Zuckerberg “a very good friend” while quipping, “What a difference between [my] first administration,” when Trump sparred with Facebook repeatedly and later threatened to throw Zuckerberg in jail.)
From BinanceEven the country’s intractable debt crisis draws real estate analogies. The country’s mounting red ink, the president notes, really is not so terrible if you think of it like a real estate mogul would: What’s the total value of America and its natural assets, he suggests, like the Grand Canyon, or even its surrounding oceans? “If you put down the value of these things, it’s like hundreds of trillions of dollars,” Trump says, and by that measure, “if you kept [the national debt] at $40 trillion, you’re way under-levered.”
As Fortune’s Geoff Colvin recently wrote, a life in real estate has shaped Trump’s leadership and decision-making style. Many big real estate players, including the Trump Organization, are controlled by one person or one family; negotiations happen face-to-face; deals happen fast. And even after five-and-a-half years in office, Trump still gets frustrated when government and policymaking don’t work that way.
Tariffs, equity stakes, and the $38 trillion question
“It really pisses me off,” the president groans, as we delve into the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that roughly half of last year’s Liberation Day tariffs were unconstitutional.
It’s not the ruling per se that he’s upset about, although he’s certainly not happy about it. He can find another way to implement tariffs, he says, just more slowly and under different laws. Instead of the $600 billion a year he estimates the U.S. would have raked in from his tariffs (a figure that has been disputed by some economists as widely overstated), Trump figures the new sum will be chopped nearly in half.
But what has specifically ticked him off is the fact that the ruling didn’t come with an asterisk that would have allowed him to keep all of the tariff revenue collected prior to the ruling.“Can you imagine—to people who hate us, to countries that ripped us off for years, I’ve got to give them back $149 billion.” (Research—some of it disputed by the White House—indicates that most of the tariffs were paid either by U.S. companies that imported goods from abroad, or by the consumers who bought those goods; those companies are eligible to claim refunds.)
There’s something deeper at stake. For decades, President Trump has backed steep taxes on imports, more recently calling tariffs the “most beautiful word in the dictionary.” In his second term, he and Lutnick envisioned tariffs bringing in new, meaningful revenue—even floating the idea of an “External Revenue Service”—that wouldn’t require hitting up Americans for more hard-earned dollars every tax season, or cutting benefits from Social Security or Medicare.
Another tentpole of this revenue strategy, though one involving much smaller sums for now, is corporate equity. On multiple occasions over the past two years, the Trump administration has taken a stake in an American corporation instead of offering a bailout, a tax subsidy, or a grant.
The Trump/Lutnick camp frames this as a smart way to help American businesses that find themselves in dire straits, while also allowing for potential return on investment. If the Treasury could get the kind of returns top venture capitalists and their limited partners make, it could eventually scale up to dent America’s deficit. If a company goes from bankrupt to billions, couldn’t it help Americans to share a piece of the pie?
The bear case: Truly free markets—a foundation of democracy—require the government not to meddle in corporate governance. Government equity stakes could make it highly tempting for a future administration to cross that line. (What’s more, most venture investments flop.)
For Trump, the decision to interject the government into a struggling American business seems to come down to both the opportunity and the ability of its leader to win him over personally. The textbook example of the equity strategy is Intel, in which Trump negotiated a 9.9% stake last summer worth about $10 billion.
The legendary chipmaker was struggling last year with problems including declining market share and a worrisome debt load. “[Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan] came in to see me,” Trump recalls. “I liked him, I thought he was good.” Trump also had leverage: substantial federal grants for chipmaking that had been earmarked, but not yet delivered, to Intel.
“I said, ‘Give the country 10% ownership for free in Intel,’ ” the president recalls. “He said, ‘You have a deal.’ I said, ‘Shit, I should have asked for more.’ ” The grants were converted into equity in August.
As Trump recounts the story, one of his aides whisks over with a computer printout of Intel’s stock performance chart and drops it into my lap. In just eight months, the government’s Intel position has grown to be worth more than $50 billion, Trump says. “Do I get credit for it? Does anybody even know I did that?”
When I ask what the government’s exit strategy could be, Trump doesn’t seem concerned. He thinks he could sell shares slowly over time without tanking the stock if he communicated his intentions properly to the market upfront.
Intel is a story where Trump’s equity strategy and his obsession with foreign competition intersect.“Intel should be the biggest company in the world right now,” Trump says. “If I had been president when all these companies started sending their chips in from China, I would have put a tariff on that would have protected Intel.” Referring to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), currently the world’s dominant chipmaker, he adds, “Intel would have all that business now, and there would be no Taiwan.”
Another American company experiencing the Trump dealmaker effect is Boeing. Aerospace is the industry in which the U.S. consistently runs a huge trade surplus (about $100 billion in 2024), and Boeing is by far that sector’s biggest exporter. In his flurry of trade diplomacy over the past two years, Trump has frequently nudged allies to commit to buying more jets. Lutnick told the All-In podcast that Boeing executives “follow me around like puppies” because Trump adds 50 to 100 planes to every big overseas deal.
Trump cheerfully tells me about being dubbed “Salesman of the Year” by Boeing CEO Ortberg, saying he’s far exceeded the number of planes sold by the best salesman Boeing itself ever employed. Indeed, three days after I meet with the president, Trump will announce in Beijing that China has agreed to buy 200 Boeing planes.
When I ask Trump what motivates him to moonlight as a Boeing-dealer-in-chief, he replies, “I want to help American companies. There’s nothing in it for me other than I want companies to do well.”
Inflation, war, and the limits of dealmaking
The morning of our meeting, the U.S. Senate approved a procedural vote that cleared the way for Kevin Warsh to be confirmed as the new Federal Reserve chair. That same day, the Bureau of Labor Statistics dropped the latest consumer price index, reporting that inflation had risen to 3.8%, up from just 3.3% the month prior.
The twin events are a reminder both of what the president wants to control, and what he can’t.
Warsh, of course, was vetted and nominated by Trump and shares the president’s general philosophy: Interest rates in America should be lower. Doing so, Trump argues, would not only boost the economy but would greatly reduce a major cost on America’s balance sheet: the roughly $3 billion per day it spends at the current rates to service the $38 trillion debt. (The Fed doesn’t control the interest rates paid on longer-term government debt—lots of factors, including the health of the economy and prevailing inflation, factor into the rates that investors demand when buying bonds—but a Fed chair committed to rate-cutting could presumably help at the margins.)
In the typical Fed playbook, of course, the need to combat inflation and the desire to cut rates are at odds. And with rising oil costs from the Iran war driving up inflation, the president seems resigned to the fact that he may have to wait for more cuts. “You can’t really look at the figures until the war is over,” he concedes.
Inflation, interest rates, and Iran have something in common: They’re problems that can’t be easily solved with personal dealmaking. The complex forces driving the Iran conflict include everything from a global nuclear-arms race to the forces of the energy markets to a seven-decade history of Iranian suspicion of U.S. hegemony. But even in the midst of war, Trump frames Iran’s leadership as though they’re more like a stubborn business rival.
“They scream all the time,” he says of the Iranians. “I can tell you one thing—they’re dying to sign [a deal]. But they make a deal, and then they send you a paper that has no relationship to the deal you made. I say, ‘Are you people crazy?’ ”
‘It’s not going to happen again’
Despite the Iran war and high oil prices, U.S. stocks are reeling off record after record. When I ask the president what he feels is behind the resilience, he replies, “We’re just strong.”
One source of that strength is capital expenditures by major tech companies: Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet, for example, are each pouring over $100 billion this year largely into AI-infrastructure-related expenses that are boosting the tech sector to mind-boggling heights.
Most Americans are not as bullish about AI as the markets are. Studies show the American public, fearing job losses and more social disruption, is significantly more pessimistic than China is about the technology, and some of the president’s AI advisors, like venture capitalist David Sacks, are worried the sentiment could cause America to lose the AI race.
When I ask the president about that anxiety, he doesn’t acknowledge the job fears but merely says that the power of AI can go both ways, and we need to be careful with it. “There’s power for good,” he says. “With medicine, I’ve already seen it.”
He notes that the deal he’s most proud of in AI is helping tech companies like Meta figure out how to build plants that can power their computing needs. “They need two times more electricity than we have right now,” he says. “We are beating China by a lot [in AI] because I allowed these plants to be built. These companies build their own electric units now, they don’t use the grid at all. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to compete … It’s important that we win.”
Asked who could continue his dealmaking legacy after his term ends, Trump demurs. “I don’t know,” he says. “I mean, it’s not going to happen again.”
With all this talk of winning, I have to point out the obvious: None of these America-first deals the president is so proud of seem possible without him at the center. After all, can anyone really say no to the man who has said his power is only limited by his own morality? I ask how the dealmaking flow can be sustained once his term is up.
“Can’t answer that question,” Trump says. “I don’t know. I mean, it’s not going to happen again.”
It’s an answer no CEO could get away with giving—a business built on one person loses most of its underlying value once they leave. Apple, an American innovator turned dominant global success story, shows the value of strong succession plans: If it hadn’t had executive talent like John Ternus to lean on when Tim Cook retires, or if Steve Jobs hadn’t had Cook, the company would have spiraled.
Which tees up my final question: Who does the president feel can best carry on his dealmaking legacy? Don Jr., Marco Rubio, JD Vance? After I pose my question, I realize the vice president has quietly slipped into the back of the room and will catch Trump’s answer.
“Whoever gets this [job] is going to be very important,” the president says. “And if you get the wrong person: disaster.”
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Connor Vukelich launched Poppin’ Jobs to streamline the job search process for entry-level workers.Courtesy of Poppin’ Jobs
For most teenagers, earning a driver’s license at 16 is a milestone of independence. It grants them the liberty to drive to a friend’s house on their own time, to see a movie, and to skip the bus to school. For Connor Vukelich, at 16, it was the catalyst for launching his business.
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After earning his driver’s license in high school, Vukelich was looking for a job. But he and his friends all kept running into the same problem: it was nearly impossible to find one. Most were being out-competed by senior-level applicants, applying to “ghost jobs,” and going through interviews just to get ghosted by employers.
Frustrated by this experience, Vukelich created Poppin’ Jobs, a platform that specifically targets U.S. job seekers between 16 and 24. It currently hosts a database of 100,000 potential job seekers.Vukelich built the platform as an alternative to legacy job boards, which he said tend to prioritize senior-level talent, focusing instead on a demographic that requires more specialized guidance.
“That made us think, why isn’t there a site dedicated to helping entry-level people getting into the workforce?’” Vukelich told Fortune about his conversations with friends at the time. “More specifically, Gen Z, getting us into the workplace and helping walk us through the process of doing it because it’s something we’ve never done before”
The job market today is growing less favorable by the day for those looking to gain a footing in an entry-level position. AI threatens to wipe out large swathes of the entry-level job market. It’s a view shared by Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman, who thinks will happen within 18 months, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who warned it will impact half of entry-level white-collar workers (though he recently tempered those remarks). A recent Anthropic study found that AI is already theoretically capable of automating the majority of tasks in management, business, finance, law, and other white-collar industries, mainly replacing the rote tasks reserved for entry-level workers.
The current state of the entry-level job market
To solve the hurdles young job seekers face—mainly the ghosting, competition, and experiential barriers that prevent those of a high school and college age from securing a spot on the first rung of the career ladder—Poppin’ Jobs features tools like résumé building and an AI interview assistant to guide them through a hiring process most are going through for the first time. And for those who don’t have licenses yet, Vukelich has a solution for that as well: a local job map for those who may only have a bike for transportation.
While there’s a lot of buzz about an ensuing entry-level job “apocalypse,” the unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds hasn’t risen much just yet. Youth unemployment sat at 9.5% in April, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. That’s slightly elevated from the days before AI entered the conversation, before OpenAI launched its first AI model in November 2022, when the unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds sat around 8%. But it’s down from a high of 10.6% last November.
Part of that is because some college grads are shifting the type of work they choose to pursue immediately after departing campus. A recent ZipRecruiter study found that a majority of college grads are finding work in entrepreneurship, the gig economy, and in freelance positions after graduating as entry-level white collar roles become harder and harder to find.
Now a 20-year-old student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., Vukelich is now focused on scaling up the number of employers on the website, hoping to attract more local jobs and volunteer opportunities.
He’s aware of the threat AI poses to the job market, and is actively looking for ways to teach Gen Zers how to integrate AI tools into their skillsets. The data supports this approach. A recent study from AI startup Writer found that employees who know how to use AI—and use it frequently—are more likely to have received a raise than workers who resist adoption.
Vukelich said he’s had many conversations with fellow students at college. His advice is always the same. “The only things people are going to hire for are passion or the knowledge of how to use AI in combination with your knowledge,” he said.
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Iran has formally created a new government body to manage the Strait of Hormuz: the Persian Gulf Strait Authority. – The PGSA just launched its official X account, promising real-time updates on Strait operations – It was announced by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council – Iran is now institutionalizing its control over the world’s most important oil chokepoint Tehran is not just blockading the Strait. It is building a bureaucracy to run it. Source: Al Jazeera
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