YouSaid · the spoken record

Jodi Kantor

lines on the record: 56
first: 2026-04-16
most recent: 2026-04-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Because young people don't have the levers to make their schools do this. And so I would, the room would be comfy, you know, good ventilation, nice food, but I would lock us in until we come up with the answer on their behalf.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“High schools too. High schools, like the idea that we are killing ourselves together into college, killing ourselves to pay for it. And yet it is. Not helping us enough to find our life's work. It's not working. If I were the queen of the world, I would have a giant meeting with really good food, like for all the college and university presidents, and we would lock ourselves into a room until we figure out how to do this better.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's such a good question for a reporter because, as you know, the starting premise of all my thinking is like, you can't change reality, right? Like you gotta start with all the givens. I think if I were, since you were giving me the chance for one second to be the queen of the world, Into anything. I would have colleges and universities get really serious about helping people find their life's work. I think the economy is probably going to force it to happen, in fact.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say is that the lesson of the Me Too report Ancara is that this stuff is just universal, right? It's like in every community. That was like, that was the shock of the Me Too moment in 2017, which is seeing these women all across the world, they have like nothing in common economically, culturally. They're all different. How can it be that every society, every career field, every economic milieu, they all have this problem?”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, to address the first part of what you said, a thousand percent like Weinstein took women's aspirations. You know, all these women, whether they were assistants or actresses, they wanted a piece of the action and he knew exactly how to turn those into vulnerabilities. You know, if you want the job, if you want the script, if you want the Oscar campaign, you know, you have to come to my room, et cetera, et cetera. I think what I would...”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, absolutely because it was so devastating, not just in the Weinstein story, but others. To see that what should be the tools of forward motion, you know, HR, workplace law. Mentorship, opportunity, the idea that these could all be used for bad things, it's devastating, you know. And the idea that it can go unaddressed for so long.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know in that stunning story that my colleagues reported just a week or two ago, Megan Tewie, my work partner on the Weinstein story, interviewed Giselle Pelico. And so what I, you know, what I would say is that the reckoning continues. Even in a climate of backlash, even with the President of the United States essentially leading the backlash against Me Too, the fact that women are still speaking up, are still coming forward. I have read a zillion obituaries for the Me Too movement. And I think they're wrong because the conversation continues.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, totally. I almost felt a responsibility in a weird way to write the book because I felt like, oh, God, I've like reported some of the worst things about the workplace. Right, you have. Yeah. And even though I'm very proud of that work, I don't want young people to look at work as dangerous a danger zone of exploitation, exactly. You know what I would say? I haven't reported on the Swawell story in particular, but I think what's interesting is the way it fits in the larger climate. I mean, even if we just talk about California, we're also talking about Caesar Chavez.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really love my job. I think, first of all, you don't have to choose, right? Like, we want both. We want both for you. We want you to have a great family life and a great professional life. Like the world is not yet so impoverished that you only get to have one or the other. And then I would say like, I think, you know, this book is coming out next week. I'm getting ready to show it to the world. And I think a really important thing for an author to say is my book is not for everybody. It is not for everybody. If you are that person who like has totally cut off the idea of work making you happy, then there's nothing I can do for you. My book is for the people who want a fighting chance of seeing their ambitions and dreams realized and want to show up at their Workplace every day saying like at some level, I just believe in this.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally, and also cancer treatment is actually a pretty optimistic field right now, the strides that are being made. I mean, as a recent cancer patient, I can tell you like it was like, I couldn't believe how optimistic the experience of being treated was, yeah.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Learned to craft journalism, and he became a personal finance columnist, and he is now helping other people, you know, essentially to protect their wallets and deal with Financial catastrophe, and for him it's a kind of, I think when people do that, it's very beautiful and it's very moving because they're taking something negative in their life and they're turning it into a source of strength and power.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, right? And this young woman, Ixaria from Columbia, but I could give you a lot of other examples, people who, when you're young, you feel very disempowered, you know, when you're confronting something hard, you feel like you don't have agency. And I'm talking about the person who faces like a family medical tragedy when they're young and says, I'm going to learn the craft of medicine because I need to establish some agency and control over the situation. Or another person like that is actually my husband, Ron Lieber, who, as you said, is the personal finance columnist here at the times. So Ron grew up on financial aid and his parents divorced and they had some contentious situations about money. And Ron felt like money was this dark, mysterious thing that was coloring the relationships that he did not understand.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have a talent for confrontation that not everybody has. I'm talking about all of the brilliant, devoted people in the medical field who went into that field because there was some tragedy or struggle. Sure. In their life, right”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and they're not getting it, it actually feels better to be in the chaos of a political campaign. Yeah, even if you think you don't want to be in politics for the long haul.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like it's like they won't say the word Voldemort, like they're like the real thing is too scary. I got to write the asterisk. You know what I would say to those people is that. Feel that way in part because they're sitting inside the libraries.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chaos is not a bad thing, and it's better than the depressing news about the workplace is permeating college right now, Kara. It is seeping down to freshman year, right? I first heard this at Stanford and then I started to hear it at other schools on text chains, a lot of students have this like grim inside joke where they won't write the word job J-O-B. They will write J. Asterisk B”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“thrown into situations like things that are new, right? Like it could even be a restaurant. It doesn't have to be something fancy, but anything that's starting where there's just a ton to be done. A political campaign is a class. I mean, this sounds like what your son's doing. Political campaign is such an amazing first job because it's like”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From stimulation and reaction. So especially if you're kind of confused about what you want to do with your life, and I love those people, those are my people, I would say get the most interesting first job you can. I think the very bad first jobs are the quiet ones. Like being a receptionist in an art gallery where nobody comes in all day. What are you going to learn there? Being a research assistant like can be really exciting in the sciences, but in some fields it can be really dull. I mean, it's basically an extension of your university experience. You know, I've continually heard over the years, and I know somebody who dropped out that getting the Rhodes scholarship can actually be like kind of a depressing experience because you're in a dark British library for a couple of years at a time. I think the best first jobs are the ones with a ton of activity meeting a ton of new people being”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct, correct. There is, I think there are a lot of young people who have bought into the fallacy that like a first job is like an Olympic dive where the entry into the pool needs to be technically correct for you to succeed. That is not true. All and what you want in a first job is stimulation. Careers are made.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, his feet are really planted on the earth in terms of kids from a very diverse array of economic backgrounds. And he said, try to add a new craft. He said learn something that is going to change your resume and give you kind of a new shop. At a different kind of job. But anyway, that's just to finish up the answer to your question of like, I think they're trying to quickly catch up, but it's a real problem that we've got this entire elaborate university system that's not answering the question.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said to them, For the kid, the good kid, the hardworking kid with good grades, Has applied for 150 jobs and not even gotten a bite? What would you say to that kid? That to me is like. Really, really, really hard. They had trouble answering the question. And I don't want to be too harsh on them because it's easy to beat up on higher learning and like their university presidents who are trying to do 5,000 things at once. But they struggled”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In their fields. And so it's like, you know, you pay this ridiculous amount of money for this education or you're able to scrape together, you know, the loans or the financial aid and you become part of this club of people who have gone to this university, except the club is not even really a club because you don't have a path to reaching the person who graduated 20 years ago who could be like a real role model and a real connection for you. There was an interesting moment at the Dealbook conference this past December, Andrew asked me to moderate a panel with university. Ross Sorkin asked me to moderate a panel with university presidents. And I asked them what I think is the hardest question in this topic area right now. I said to them, and these were killer university presidents, right? Like just incredibly impressive people.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's where I want to go. That's where I want to go. So there are exceptions. Before I say the harsh thing, I want to give credit to the people out there really doing exceptional work. Most students are telling me I feel like my education is completely disconnected from this question of how to find your life's work. I won't use his name because I'm not sure he would want to say it publicly. But yesterday I spoke to a student Northwestern. I mean a truly great university filled with amazing things. And this kid said to me like, college is great, but it does not feel like a path to finding my life's work. I'm also seeing a lot of schools, including Columbia, my alma mater, where there is Really no effective way of students reaching alumni.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It varies. You know, the way we usually think of universities are like, what are the fancy universities? What are the less fancy universities? There's a different way to organize it, which is which are the universities that are really good at helping students meet their career destinies and which are not.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have, like, ostentation, and this is a very hard thing to see, but there is a way in which pursuing only money is actually selling yourself short. So that's the first thing I would say. The second thing I would say is that it's not or. You know, I think if I can just be like everybody's mom for a second, I want three things if you're young and starting out. This is what I want for you. I want financial stability plus, right? Like I want you to have what you need or better. I want you to find meaning in what you do, and I'd like you to contribute something to other people. To me, those are the three. And I don't understand why our universities don't make that explicit.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, totally. I can remember my father's face as I told him that I was leaving my earning power over here to become a journalist. I think that is a great question. And the question for many young people. And thank you, my rich BFF. I want to say two things. I want to say, first of all, I want to challenge everybody out there to think about the difference between achieving financial stability and equipoise versus chasing untold wealth. I think those are two different things. I think it's hard to see the difference when you're 21 years old. You have the $40,000 in debt that you just mentioned. You don't like, you don't know what compound interest is yet. You know, you don't know how a mortgage really works. You know, for the young people reading this book, do I want you to suffer and want and not be able to pay your bills? No, absolutely.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know not completely established, I can maybe disregard some conventional wisdom that doesn't seem completely right for me. You know, I dropped out of law school to become a journalist. All my best career decisions, Kara, were about disregarding what other people thought.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm so glad you asked because I think this is the situation right now. The world is so nuts and things are so topsy turvy we're living through climate disasters and school shootings and political turmoil, you know, et cetera, et cetera, that everybody wants stability. Like that's natural, that's rational. And I meet a lot of young people who just want to find like what seems like safe harbor and the most stable path. And I get that. My role is not to tell them that they're wrong, but my role is to point out. You don't really get anywhere great without taking on some risk. It's just like a necessary ingredient in business, in other areas. So what is a well-calibrated risk look like? I think it looks like saying, I don't need a perfectly coherent resume when I'm 18 or 22 or 24 years old. I can try something new.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, how do you not end up in one, right? I mean, here is a piece of just like direct advice, right? You have to go work for the best people you can in terms of bosses. Like that is, speaking of severance, the difference, if there are two jobs that are identical for a person who's graduating, and one is at like kind of a faceless, disembodied corporation. And the other is working for somebody you really admire who, you know, is a teacher and has a track record of encouraging young people, there is no comparison, even if there are certain things about the class.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People who are graduating now are surrounded by negative images of work. It is the severance era on TV, right? And so to have, I think that very public positive example of that moon mission is just great.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have everything that I think we want out of work. They have teamwork. They have true fellowship with one another. They have done something absolutely extraordinary, even if it's been done before, like getting to the moon is still basically impossible. And they pulled it off. There's an immense accumulation of learning and technical craft that their mission was based on. They were accomplishing something for themselves, but also something for the collective. Like it was really...”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my God. I mean, listen, I don't know what's going to happen, but I have a 20-year-old kid. Am I going to tell her that she doesn't have to worry about career stuff because before too long we'll be in an age of AI abundance and she's just going to be able to like play a guitar all day. You know, I mean, I think we need a humility about what the hell is really going to happen to employment. children and young people need to make durable well-crafted plans based on time tested principles that won't like protect them from every bad thing because that's not realistic Will give them the best chance of going the distance. I mean, like work happiness is still possible. Look at this moon expedition. I fell down the Instagram hole of watching all the astronaut videos. And it's extraordinary there.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most valuable thing about you, your edge, your spark, your initiative, the crazy thing that happened to you, it is not making it into the process. And so you have to find a different way to forge that connection.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scanning these keywords so then the kids are all putting identical keywords in their letters and resumes. And as a result, employers are very frustrated. They're getting too many applications because it's really easy to apply for a zillion jobs digitally. But also it's making everybody look the same.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, it sounds to me like a uniquely cara swishian thing to be able to get a job by insulting somebody. I'm not sure anybody but you could pull that off. But here's what I think is different. You're right that the onion skin and like the, you know, feasless emails and whatever are a little bit the same. But here's what's different, which is that employers are actually having tremendous trouble telling anybody apart right now because the AI software has homogenizing effect on applicants. So instead of rewarding the charm or engagement or spark of intelligence in a cover letter,”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The worst version of that is like Nepo Baby's Gone Wild, right? Where like the kids who are already hooked and connected are getting all the best stuff and everybody else is left out in the cold, the better version of that is that we are advising young people on how to forge connections themselves. And we are teaching them ways to reach past the technology. There's actually a space in the book where like I know that reaching out to strangers is really intimidating when you're just starting. So I actually give a list of my tips as an investigative reporter because I cold call and cold email people all day.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Well, yeah, yeah, but like any prognosticator who's overly certain about the ultimate answers, I don't personally trust her by. But what we can tell people right now is that yes, the hiring process itself has been truly digitized. I think the advice on that is pretty clear, which is that personal connection is actually becoming more important in the face of these digital tools.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think of the AI interviews where young people are talking to machines. I'm talking to young people like your nephew who say to me, Jody, I applied for 150 jobs and I didn't meet anybody in the process. And so the first thing to sort of separate is to say, like, do we know what's going to really happen with AI and entry-level employment long term? No, I think it's too early. Like, I don't really trust the prognostics.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what you're saying is so important. And for anyone who's middle aged like us and has had a job for a while or hasn't applied or whatever, like what you just said, I just want to underline is completely true. Hiring is being digitized, not by everybody, but by a lot of employers. And so the experience of being young and looking for a job, which we think of as a social experience filled with handshakes and conversations, that notion is somewhat outdated. Think of giant digital portals that are black boxes that are not giving you any feedback on whether you really have a chance or not.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want you to think about chasing bigger needs, right? Because this is kind of a defensive time and an unstable time. A lot of people are thinking small. He said, the tools of AI are so powerful that we have a shot at being able to attack things like poverty, you know, hunger, illiteracy, climate change that once appeared out of reach. So he was talking about the biggest needs of all needs that are so huge that they are very intimidating to think about. And what I liked to come back to your citation of ambition, I liked that he was, I liked that he was encouraging ambition. I liked that he was encouraging reaching for the moon.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jet fuel, and also so many of the people you and I have covered over the years, I don't know if you feel the same way some of the most admirable people are people who took some pain or tragedy in their life and made their life an answer to that. So she's a very young version of somebody like that. The last thing I'll say is that I was just talking to the CEO of LinkedIn, Ryan Muslansky. He and Anish Raman have a terrific book called Open Twork, which is about work in the AI that just came out. And I was in an audience where he was asked about his advice for young people. And he said something I thought was really interesting and worth passing on. So first he gave like the conventional line, which is like, listen, acquaint yourself with these tools. They're going to be important. You don't want to be illiterate in them. And then he said.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To an overdose, and her motivation in becoming a psychologist is that she wants to forge new forms of addiction treatment. She wants to make addiction treatment more effective. The need she wants to meet is so real and so powerful that I can already see it serving as”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there are a couple of ways to address this. Let's do the lightning round. One is there are just the obvious needs that are permanent and lasting and that we're not going to trust AI to or not trust it to for a very long time. Like I just had breast cancer and I needed a mastectomy. And that is just a very powerful need in the world that unfortunately is going to continue. So you can find something like that that, you know, is just a very durable kind of need. You can look to your demons. One of the most remarkable people I met in the course of writing this book is her name is Exaria. She graduated in that Columbia class of 2025. She was hell-bent on becoming a research psychologist, getting a PhD in psych. She encountered all sorts of career obstacles, which she ended up fielding and leaping over. And her motivation was that when she was 11, she lost her brother Keith.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when that happened, I was kicked off for bad reasons. And I was like, journalism is chaos. Like, I would never want to be a part of this thing, right? This is a banana republic. Like, this is capricious. This is nuts. It took me until many years later. To understand that journalism is a craft. And that, you know, what I have done in my career is work to learn a very powerful set of tools that need to be deployed very judiciously, but when they are wielded well can have tremendous results like when Megan and I did the RV Weinstein story, that was like the accumulation of all the craft we had learned and all the craft Dean McKay had learned and Matt Purdy and Rebecca Corbett. And so that's, yeah, that to me, it's a lot more muscle than just following your passion.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your work? Are you doing something special that other people don't know how to do? And is it of value to others? It's not just about your individual passion, right? It's about providing a sense of connectedness to the bigger picture of society and other people. That is what I think Craft is, and part of the reason to really talk to young people about it is that it's like very hard to see actually when you're young. I mean, so my personal confession, which I tell the whole story in the book, is that I was kicked off my college paper.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's exactly right. I mean, like, needless to say, this is not a time for happy, go-lucky, naive, optimism about just do what you love and it's all going to work out. I mean, I think we're all really past that. I think this is a different message. This says that the measure of a career Is what you do hour by hour. And if we pop in on you at 11 30 in the morning on a random Thursday and we ask the following question, do you feel connected to the task before you? I mean, every job has annoying aspects that we don't like, but do you feel fundamentally engaged?”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally, but I think the reason it's important now is because the psychological message of the AI moment for young people is you're not needed. And that's a damaging statement and it's not actually true. We do need the talents and hard work of young people. And so need is a way of saying what is the thing that's going to pull me along?”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Need is your independent assessment of what society will need over the course of your working life. You know, you and I are old enough to have lived through all of these stupid fashions about like what you supposedly have to study. When I was in high school, it was learn Japanese. And we were told that if we did not speak Japanese, we were going to be lost because the Japanese were going to take over the world economy. Meanwhile, as we know, the Japanese stock market languished for 30 years. Then it was learned genetics. And then it was Learn Mandarin. And then, of course, it was computer science. And listen, these are all great disciplines. These are all amazing things to study. But the idea that one of them is going to be a golden ticket that is going to, you know, be an automatic short path for you in life is, I think, very obviously a bad idea. So need is an alternative, right? It's saying.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Craft is having a special skill, having something that other people don't know how to do. You know, the craft of surgery is an obvious one, but so is like the craft of comedy and truly knowing how to tell a great joke, the craft of running a restaurant really successfully. When you have a craft, it's not something that comes instantly. It's something you are like working up to often very slowly for you get, you get, it's so hard to see when you're young how awesome craft can feel when you're finally at the pinnacle a couple of decades later. Craft in this environment, I think also has some protective value. You know, we'll talk about AI. Obviously, the job market is a cruel place. Any of us can be fired at any point. But your craft, nobody can take away from you. So, craft number one, let's call craft authority. Need is propulsion.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I've watched Dean's speech. I love it. But when I was listening to you a second ago, you know, the question was, well, what is ambition? What is ambition? Is it just ambition to make money or is it ambition to really take on hard things? And this is a hard time to think about this. Here is the gist of what I want young people to know. I have just seen so much, I have seen bad career advice and I have seen no career advice. And so this is my alternative to those two things. When I look around my life, my reporting, the people I've covered, when I look at your career, the people who I think are both most successful and happiest at work because we want both, their careers are a combination of two things, craft and need.”
2026-04-16 · On with Kara Swisher · Beat the Resume Bots & Build a Career You Love with Jodi Kantor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT