We Never Left the Industrial Age: AI and the Future of Work with Aneesh Raman

**Aneesh Raman** (0:00)
We are in a battle of belief right now more than anything else. So stories matter a lot to humans. It's not just the tools we create, it's the stories we tell that have allowed us to become everything we become. But whether it leads to better or worse depends on the story we tell now. If we tell ourselves a story, it's going to lead to worse, it's more likely going to lead to worse. So you have to unwind a lot of what the industrial age has told us to think about ourselves. A lot of industrial age work was about deficit management. I don't have the degree yet, I need to get it. I don't have the job title yet, I need to get it.
We all started from a place of what we don't have that we needed to get in order to feel a value and succeed.
This world.

**Bernard Leong** (0:38)
Welcome to Analyse Podcast, the premier podcast dedicated to dissecting the pulse of business technology and media globally. I'm Bernard Leong, and the labor market is going through a structural rewiring that most public narratives flatten into AI is taking away jobs. The deeper shift from pedigree to skills, from static job titles to dynamic tasks, and from the industrial era organization chart to something more fluid. We'll be today, Anish Raman, Chief Economic Opportunity Officer at LinkedIn, and co-author of Open to Work, How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI.
We'll cover three angles together, why the bottom rank of the career ladder is breaking, what skills first hiring actually requires inside real organizations, and how leaders and workers move from anxiety to agency in this transition. So, Anish, welcome to the show.

**Aneesh Raman** (1:33)
Thank you for having me.

**Bernard Leong** (1:34)
So, this is a very interesting topic, but I always want to find the origin story about my guest. So, how do you start your career?

**Aneesh Raman** (1:43)
Well, I started my career as a journalist.
I was a war correspondent with CNN, Middle East correspondent. But I started journalism kind of in middle school. And I think it started because I grew up in a family with really loud talkers, especially on my mom's side. And I was always terrified of talking because I would just get told like speak, tell a story, make a joke. And I would just shut down and get really quiet. So, I think I found through television, an ability to build this skill that is now core to who I am talking, but by looking at a camera and then eventually wrote speeches for President Obama and now I've written a book. So, the through line is sort of storytelling, but it started because I was afraid to talk.

**Bernard Leong** (2:24)
I think it's interesting, right? You've done war correspondent in Iraq. I am sure those are life and death situations. And then you work at the speechwriter, treasure hunter, Timothy Guyner, during the financial crisis is actually very stressful. And then subsequently you also work with Governor Gavin Newsom. What do you see in retrospect that and how your personal history shaped the way in how you're thinking about the current AI transition?

**Aneesh Raman** (2:47)
Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I grew up probably more than anything else as the child of immigrants. My parents came from India in the 70s because America was meant to be this land of opportunity. So I was very conscious from my earliest days that my life was sort of in the shadow of their sacrifice and that I was in this country of opportunity and I should go take advantage of it. And I lived a life that delivered on that. The harder I worked, I could go to Harvard, I could get a job as a reporter, I could work at the White House. But across those phases, when you're in a war zone, you see sort of human agency at its worst. You see people smarter than you that are trapped in the rubble of literal war who can't go as far as their talent or tenacity will take them. You get in the depths of the 8 financial crisis and you see people that suddenly are bankrupt, losing their home. They can't go as far as their tenacity and talent will take them.
A lot of the early parts of my career started with this presumption that the world as it should be is one where everyone should be able to exercise agency and access opportunity. The world as it was, was in a lot of places people lacking that agency, lacking that access to opportunity.
As I got to LinkedIn, it became clear that was true in the labor market. I think the labor market is one of the least efficient, least transparent, least dynamic markets humans have ever created. If the job of the labor market is to match talent and opportunity, it does a horrible job at that. It generally, based on guesswork, indexes on pedigree signals. Did you get the right degree from the right school? Did you get the right job at the right employer? Do you know the right people? That isn't access to opportunity. That is an agency inducing if you're not born in the right circumstance.