David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout - Odd Lots

[SouthBayDem]

Mar 24, 2026 Odd Lots
Nobody knows when or if AI will lead to mass displacement of white-collar work. But the anxiety is clearly here now, and there's very little evidence that our politicians are taking it seriously. Of course, there are at least two questions operating at once here. The first is whether or not AI really poses a significant threat to the existing labor market. And then the second one is about the correct policy response. This was the subject of a recent Odd Lots episode recorded live at SXSW in Austin, Texas. In this conversation, we were joined by David Shor, a political consultant, pollster and founder of Blue Rose Research, as well as Byrne Hobart, the writer of TheDiff newsletter, and a general partner at Anomaly Fund, an early-stage venture capital firm. We discuss the prospects of a labor market disaster, what David's polling says about the public view, and possible policy considerations that could be palatable to both industry and the general public.

Here is the full transcript. The guests make great points. For instance, Byrne Hobart points out a big difference between stated opinions vs. actual behavior around AI at 28:30:

...when you ask people about AI, when you're making it salient, they have one set of views. But if you look at their behavior, they have a different set of views...Older demographics nominally don't like AI, but they spend a lot of time on Facebook, which means they actually do really like AI. They like AI recommendation engines. They are very tolerant of AI recommended ads. They love AI generated images and AI generated text. They feel much more comfortable on a site where an AI is actually going to tell them what the comment should say and they don't have to come up with a comment. People actually love AI from a consumption perspective and hate it from like the outside abstract perspective.

David Shor also explains why so many YouTube videos, blogs, or social media posts appear so wildly sensational and out of touch with actual, real-world mainstream opinion at 44:16:

...because content is expensive to produce, if you are a influencer or a writer about politics, your economic incentives are really to focus on the 5% of the public that is consuming way, way more political content than everyone else, and really, basically, no one in the political spectrum right now is making content focused on regular people who don't care that much about politics. Just to give an example, someone I know had a a panel of Tik Tok users where he recorded their phones, and it was like 200 people...After Charlie Kirk got shot, there was one
person who was responsible for a majority of the Charlie Kirk videos.

[...]

If you look at who these people are, um they tend to be quite anxious. They they tend to be quite neurotic. Like right now the attention game really pushes you toward being more negative, while the persuasion game of how you actually get someone to change their mind really pushes you in the opposite direction. Every time I've done a poll, every time I've done a test, it's generally said you should be more positive. You should focus more on regular things that affect people's lives. And you know the reason why that doesn't happen are the incentives of the actual content creators. And so I could see lowering the costs of producing content and broadening out who is able to make content.

Perhaps the people who would be attracted to calmer, persuasive types of videos or articles are busy with grass-touching engagement with politics such as phone banking or lobbying, or the real adult responsibilities of life, instead of fishing for likes or shares on TikBook.