The generation willing to trade 25% of their salary.
And the creator who's building the first $1B empire.
Went to Hannah Berner’s standup set last night.
I was shocked to see the audience was about 30% men. For a comedian who built her base through Giggly Squad (a girl talk podcast that proudly “de-centers” men)… that’s something.
Hannah was surprised too, joking about how many guys were there on dates, dragged by girlfriends. But the guy in the row behind me was definitely there just to hang out.
What’s running through my brain this morning: comedy is one of the last content moats that scales in the age of AI. You can’t automate stage presence. You can’t prompt engineer timing or the ability to read a room in real time.
Hannah went from reality TV to podcast to selling out theaters to Time’s 100 Most Influential Creators list. That’s a Rich Future playbook.
Now, let’s get into what moved this week across money, AI, and the future of work.
Future of Money
67% of Gen Z believe income stacking is essential for financial security.
Fiverr’s annual Next Gen of Work report dropped October 8 with data from 12,000+ Gen Z and Gen Alpha respondents across the U.S., UK, France, and Germany.
67% of Gen Z believe income stacking is essential for financial security
56% think traditional employment will become obsolete
38% are already freelancing or plan to
14% have career ambitions of working for a well-known corporation
Gen Z is the first generation to redefine what financial security looks like. Instead of betting everything on one employer, they’re building an income portfolio. I wrote about how to stop thinking in paychecks and build your own version of this a few weeks ago:
For operators and business owners, this means your retention strategy needs to evolve.
You’re not competing with other employers anymore… you’re competing with the optionality of a diversified income stack.
The companies that win talent will be the ones that enable portfolio building, not fight it. Let people build side income, develop their personal brands, take on advisory roles. If you try to own 100% of someone’s capacity, you’ll lose them to someone who only asks for 60% and pays just as well.
The IRS needs to catch up.
The current W2 vs 1099 system wasn’t built for people with five income streams. Watch for increasing policy pressure in the next 12 months as more people operate in this gray zone.
This thinking extends beyond work into relationships too.
When you’re choosing a life partner, complementary income stacks matter. Can one person’s portfolio cover housing while the other’s covers healthcare and investments? This is how we think in my home. I’d bet within 24 months, this becomes a mainstream conversation.
Future of AI
ChatGPT has 800M weekly users (that’s 10% of all humans)
Sam Altman opened DevDay on October 6 with a number that should make every AI founder nauseous: 800M weekly active users, up from 700M last month. That’s 100M new weekly users in 30 days. And they’re processing 8 billion API tokens per minute.
Let’s just sit with that for a second.
It took Facebook 8 years to hit 1 billion users. ChatGPT will cross a billion before its 3rd birthday.
If you’re building in AI, you’re either integrating with ChatGPT or you’re constantly explaining why your standalone app is better than just asking ChatGPT to do the thing.
Everyone’s focused on the user count. I’m looking at the 8 billion tokens per minute. Every one of those is a compute cost OpenAI has to either eat or optimize. Training models have been getting all the headlines the past few months, but inference is where money gets made or cremated.
With 800M users, that scale lets OpenAI negotiate better chip deals (see AMD), drive down inference costs, and still monetize through subscriptions, API access, and enterprise deals that competitors can’t match.
The AI race is over.
Founders need to accept this.
OpenAI won through distribution.
What’s left is building things ChatGPT can’t or won’t do.
Future of Work
Workers take a 25% pay cut to stay remote.
New study coming out of Harvard/Brown/UCLA found U.S. workers would accept up to 25% less pay to continue working remotely… way bigger than earlier surveys showing 8-20%.
40% said they’d take at least a 5% cut for WFH freedom.
10% said they’d take a 20% cut
The study uses real job choice data (people picking lower-paying remote jobs over higher-paying office jobs) to assign real dollar values on flexibility.
We’re five years post-pandemic and the remote work fight continues.
The willingness to sacrifice up to ~25% salary is not a casual preference… people have recalibrated what their time and sanity are worth.
For businesses, the tactics are obvious: if you want top talent and won’t offer flexibility, prepare to pay a hefty premium or watch people walk. If you do embrace remote, you can attract great people at a “discount” or keep them happier at the same pay.
Smart operators will use this to differentiate.
The market has decided.
The future of work is flexible whether executives like it or not.
Here’s a few more signals on my radar that indicate how capital and culture are moving...
S&P Global is launching the Digital Markets 50 Index. 35 crypto companies + 15 cryptocurrencies in one index. This is the first time crypto assets and traditional equities are being tracked together. The wall between TradFi and crypto just dissolved.
Brands aren’t working with AI influencers as much this year... because they flop.
Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper opened an ad agency. First client is Google. She’s already got a $100M Sirius deal, Unwell Hydration, and a podcast network pulling 10M listeners per episode. My call: she’s the first creator to build a $1B empire.
Kalshi just raised $300M at a $5B valuation. The fastest-growing company outside AI, with 200x volume growth in a year. Prediction markets are now a legitimate asset class.
Someone opened trades 30 mins before Trump’s China tariff announcement Friday, made $192M in profit, and closed the position before market close. Markets dropped hard. The timing was notable. Do with that what you will.
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