MUF #10 If AI Kills Work, What’s Left? A Conversation with Tech Visionary Ilja Laurs

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Welcome to another unfiltered episode where I’m joined by my long-time friend and tech visionary, Ilja Laurs. Ilja is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and a public figure who has been shaping the technology landscape for over two decades. He was recognized by the World Economic Forum, CNBC, and The Wall Street Journal for his contributions to technology and the mobile internet ecosystem.

In this episode, we're not just scratching the surface; we're diving headfirst into the most pressing questions of our time. We explore Ilja's incredible journey building GetJar, one of the world's first and largest app stores before the Apple App Store and Google play, which scaled to tens of millions of users. Then, we go deep into the future of work and the shocking reality that AI is targeting high-level, college-educated jobs—not the low-level ones we all expected. If you think your job is safe and that your Ivy-league MBA will save you, think again!

We also debate whether humanity is on a collision course with a "people-less economy" where many of us move away from traditional jobs to instead rely on universal basic income while robots and AI do most of the work we used to do. And for my European listeners, Ilja delivers a harsh reality check: he fears Europe is heading down a path toward the same kind of economic collapse seen in the Soviet Union in the 1990's.

This is a conversation that will challenge everything you believe about our future, education, society and government.

If this episode moved you or gave you a different lens on adversity and growth, I want to invite you to go deeper.

I wrote Step Back and Leap for people exactly like us. People building through chaos. People trying to find meaning inside uncertainty. People choosing purpose over comfort. You can get it here:
https://a.co/d/e4nd8RT

And if you want practical tools you can use today to strengthen your resilience, I created a short, tactical guide you can download immediately. It’s called The Mork Guide to Resilience and it is designed to help you build inner strength, recover faster, and lead from a grounded place:
https://aa5c-ea.systeme.io/resilience

Because sometimes the most powerful leaps forward start with stepping back, grounding yourself, and reconnecting to why you are here in the first place.

— Patrick