Morning Brew Daily
AI Replacing White Collar Jobs? & Airlines Upcharge Solo Travelers
Mon, 02 Jun 2025
Episode 595: Neal and Toby talk about the trend of entry-level white-collar jobs being replaced by AI, which has put recent college graduates in a losing situation. Then, President Trump says he plans to double steel and aluminum tariffs to 50%, adding fuel to the trade war fire. Also, solo travelers are being charged higher fares by airlines. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift and no income tax states for NHL players are the winners of the weekend. Finally, the biggest news you need to know this week. Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. LinkedIn will even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign so you can try it yourself. Go to LinkedIn.com/MBD Terms and conditions apply. Only on LinkedIn Ads. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow 00:00 - Hamptons Rentals Down 03:10 - Anthropic CEO’s Warning 08:20 - Tariffs on Aluminum and Steel 12:20 - Airline Solo Traveler Fees 17:15 - Winners of the Weekend 23:30 - Week Ahead Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the trends in Hamptons rentals?
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Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, airlines got exposed for charging solo travelers more than groups for the same exact ticket.
Ben, is AI really going to take your job? One major CEO certainly thinks so. It's Monday, June 2nd. Let's ride.
Good morning and welcome back to the week. Apparently the 1% are not feeling 100%. A new report from CNBC stated that rentals in the Hamptons this summer are down nearly a third from the same period in the last few years. The picture is even bleaker at the ultra high end of the market where the Hamptons rental business is down between 50% and 75%.
The lower demand has prompted some listings to lower their prices by 10 to 20% to save their summer. Toby, either this is a sign of economic uncertainty or everyone is finally realizing the Jersey Shore is just better.
Or you put on your meteorologist hat and realize that it's been cold and rainy in May, so maybe people are just delaying their vacations a little bit. I tend to think that maybe It also could be a recession indicator, though, because the demand is just simply not there.
And if you zoom out to the broader second home market, homebuyers took out just 86,000 mortgages for second homes last year per Redfin. That is down 66% from the pandemic homebuying peak. It was the lowest since 2018.
So yes, you can bust out the world's tiniest violin for these one percenters, but also possibly a recession indicator if the wealthiest are clamming up and holding onto their cash a little bit more. And now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn ads. Neil, you ever get stuck in zone nine on a flight?
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Chapter 2: What warnings did the Anthropic CEO give about AI?
He didn't use those words exactly, but he may as well have because according to an interview with Axios, Amadei thinks AI could eliminate up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment as high as 20% within five years, a scenario he says the government and tech leaders are dangerously underestimating.
He believes most Americans don't grasp how fast AI capabilities are accelerating and especially agentic AI, that can replace humans across white-collar fields like law, finance, and tech, and by the time they do, it may be too late.
Now, the irony here is that Anthropic just released a new, wildly powerful model called Claude Opus 4, which threatened to blackmail an engineer, so he is pushing forward the very technology he is sounding off about. Amadei does acknowledge AI's massive upside,
from curing cancer to potentially supercharging economic growth, but he also foresees a world where too few people can contribute economically, creating deepening inequality and even undermining democracy. His call to action, stop sugarcoating the AI revolution, warn the public, educate workers, and explore policies like an AI usage tax before the coming job disruption becomes irreversible.
Neil, this interview generated a lot of headlines over the weekend, and rightfully so, though some pushed back saying it was mostly just the AI hype cycle at work.
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Chapter 3: How will President Trump's tariffs affect the steel industry?
But if you are looking for warning signs of an AI job apocalypse, especially for those entry-level roles, you can find them. Just look at the jobless rate right now for people just coming out of college, ages 22 to 27 with a bachelor's degree. The unemployment rate was close to 6% in April, very unusually high compared to just over 4% for the overall workforce.
We've seen some interesting layoff announcements recently related to AI. Microsoft laid off 6,000 workers, about 30% of the company. Many of those engineers. CrowdStrike, that big cybersecurity company, slashed 5% of its workforce, citing a market and technology inflection point with AI. reshaping every industry.
A LinkedIn executive wrote an op-ed saying, I see the bottom rung of the career ladder breaking. So there's a number of voices now and a number of data points you could point to, obviously, that don't show an AI job apocalypse or 50% of the entry-level workforce being wiped out. But there are some crumbs here.
Yeah, Amadei didn't actually cite any research or evidence for that 50% number, but it did make a lot of headlines. Here's how he kind of sees it going down. Right now, obviously these companies are improving their large language models at a pretty rapid rate. This is happening and it's only getting faster. And the U.S. government is not necessarily doing anything.
It's a little bit of sleep at the wheel because, one, it doesn't want to lose to China in this AI race. And so they don't necessarily want to throttle an industry, especially when we're in competition with China. So they don't pass any regulations about AI or even cautioning the American public. So most Americans just go about their days.
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Chapter 4: Why are solo travelers facing higher airline fares?
generating their little images with AIs, but pay little attention to what is actually going on and how they might be replaced. And so then potentially overnight, this flip has been switched and all of these companies who have been working on this in the background starts to replace humans, start to reap those cost-saving benefits. And they don't backfill new ones.
They don't start hiring any new roles. And that's where this AI apocalypse comes from. Now, the flip side here is that we've gone through multiple technological revolutions before that have... hypothetically replace a lot of workers, but usually it leads to more job creation. I mean, Mark Cuban said we used to have hundreds of thousands of secretaries and typists in offices.
Now we don't have that anymore. So there is a flip side to this argument, but you see where kind of this fear is coming from, from Amadei.
Yeah, and the argument on that argument is that all of those technological revolutions took decades to pan out, in which case the workforce could be retrained in those new technologies. So you got rid of typists, but they learned how to code, and that took decades.
He is warning that this AI job apocalypse will happen in one to five years, which is far too fast for everyone to get up to speed and learn these new technologies or be employed in new jobs that are created as a result of them.
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Chapter 5: Who were the winners of the weekend?
And then let's talk about one of his policy ideas that Amadei floated, which is this idea of a token tax, which is every time someone uses a model, you actually tax 3% of that revenue and goes towards the governments to be redistributed in some way.
He said, obviously, this is not in my own economic interest because he runs a big AI company in Anthropic, but he does think that that's a good step for a government to take to potentially have some buffer for the citizens of countries rather than just having it all run. We take your job away and reap the benefits economically.
So this token tax is maybe something that you'll start to see tossed around a little bit more on Capitol Hill and potentially in other countries as well.
President Trump must have watched a lot of TikTok in 2021 because he is doubling it and passing it to the next person. On Friday, the president said he would increase tariffs. on steel and aluminum imports to 50%, up from 25% currently.
He said these higher tariff rates would go into effect this Wednesday and effectively create a fence around US producers in order to protect them from cheaper metals flowing in from other countries. At 25%, they can sort of get over that fence, he said, At 50%, they can no longer get over the fence.
And the US's trading partners were not happy to hear about this fence, warning of mutually assured economic destruction if it were to go up. The steel industry in Canada, which is the top metal supplier to America following decades of integration, predicted, quote, catastrophic job losses from factory slowdowns due to the tariffs.
The EU also blasted the doubling move, saying it undermines ongoing trade negotiations and only ratchets up the uncertainty facing businesses. Now, it's worth noting that the tariff announcement didn't come from a truth social post per usual, but from a place far more symbolic, a U.S. steel facility near Pittsburgh. Trump was touting a, quote, partnership between Nippon and U.S.
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Chapter 6: What should we expect in the week ahead?
Steel that would see the Japanese giant inject $14 billion into the fading American icon to save it from irrelevance. However, the specifics of that deal remain uncertain and nothing has been finalized yet, including crucial details like the governance structure of a U.S. Steel subsidiary.
So what's the goal here? The goal is to increase U.S. production of steel and aluminum. And sure, tariffs could do this. They could boost job creation demand for U.S. steel. But if you reduce foreign imports of steel basically to zero from places like Canada, that is going to lead to a lot of headaches downstream of the actual steel industry.
Think industries like automakers or even consumer packaged goods who use cans and aluminum like Pepsi or Coca-Cola to produce create and package their beverages. So now you're talking about supply chain disruptions, but then you're also talking about higher prices for consumers, which is why a lot of people are saying this is probably not the most economically sound policy.
And then you look at the fact that most U.S. steel factories, the ones that are modern and cost-effective, are already in use. So where is the extra production going to come from? That might mean re-putting into circulation factories that have been sitting idle, that weren't necessarily super efficient. That is not a quick process whatsoever.
So just because you threatened this levy doesn't necessarily mean it magically fixes the steel industry.
Let's talk about the Nippon US Steel acquisition merger plan partnership, whatever you want to call it. Some details have emerged about what this will look like. Let's do a quick rewind. Remember, Nippon is the Japanese giant, third largest steel company in the world. It's wanted to buy U.S. steel for 14 billion dollars. And it was blocked by Biden. It was blocked by Trump.
And then in recent months, it seems like there had been some thawing from the Trump administration opposition to this deal. And now it looks like he's blessing this merger. It looks like they're going to do some governance maneuvering in order to get those national security concerns squashed. There might be an American CEO of U.S. Steel, a U.S.
majority board, and what's known as a golden share, which grants the U.S. government veto power over certain corporate functions and board appointments would be, which would be a very unusual arrangement to have the U.S. government be all in this company's business in a way that, you know,
many other countries are like Europe and China, but it's not necessarily a level of government intervention that we have had historically here in the United States. And some people say, OK, well, maybe if we're doing the golden share with U.S.
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