100M Jobs at Risk, Midterms Will Cost Record Amounts, and the Corporate Policy Teams No One's Talking About

Here’s what I’m watching closely and 10 links I don’t want you to miss

Greetings from Austin! I’m in town visiting my friend and her family, and on Monday I’ll be teaching a content moderation course at the Public Affairs School at the University of Texas to about 30 students learning about disinformation. Here are 10 links I’m paying attention to this week. Is there anything I missed?

1. Washington Post: Americans have become more pessimistic about AI. Why? — Shira Ovide interviewed me this week about why people might be pessimistic about AI. We explored quite a bit, but one thing that didn’t make it into the story is that people might say they’re pessimistic, but they’re still using the tools. The Vault Stock, a stock image company I use, posted on Instagram this week about how their clearly labeled AI images top the charts every month.

2. Korn Ferry: Confidence: Shaken and Stirred — I’m obsessed with this latest CEO survey from Korn Ferry, which shows that leaders feel least prepared for geopolitical risk, and 25 percent say a barrier to improving risk resilience is a lack of expertise or talent. If you were impacted by the federal government’s downsizing and still looking for a job, this survey should be in your pitch.

3. Korn Ferry: The Mind Meld — Struggling with understanding how to incorporate humans into your AI integration? Korn Ferry also examines how businesses are trying to strike a balance. An important thing to figure out, since a new report from Senate Democrats says AI could cut 100 million US jobs.

4. Chaotic Era: New data: How politics shifted on YouTube last quarter — Right-leaning accounts grew the most in Q3, according to Kyle Tharp, due to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Jimmy Kimmel and Israel/Palestine were also the most discussed. FOX and MSNBC’s channels had the most views, suggesting that even though cable news viewership might be going down, it’s perhaps just shifting to YouTube (which continues to dominate TV viewing).

5. Assembly: ‘Election Outlook’ Report: 2026 Midterms Projected to be the most expensive In history — If you run digital ads as part of your marketing, make sure you take into account next year’s US midterms as your prices might go way up — especially in states like Georgia with tight races.

6. Stanford GSB: Investing in Political Expertise: The Remarkable Scale of Corporate Policy Teams — Think that the only way companies impact public policy is through lobbying? Think again. This new Stanford report shows that companies hire far more policy experts than lobbyists. (I can confirm this from my time at Facebook and my time on the ground with major organizations — they do this!)

7. The Wall Street Journal: Texas Senator Ted Cruz Wants to Make It Easier to Sue the Government for Censorship — Another week, another hearing on censorship. I talked to the Washington Post about the delicate dance Republicans are doing trying to accuse the Biden administration of jawboning when Trump is doing it himself.

8. 404 Media: Can You Win a Congressional Seat Without Social Media? — I understand the gimmick to try to win a primary without using social media, but I highly doubt it’s going to work.

9. OpenAI: Disrupting malicious uses of AI: October 2025 — Most interesting thing from OpenAI’s latest report is how they “continue to see threat actors bolt AI onto old playbooks to move faster, not gain novel offensive capability from our models.” They also released findings evaluating political bias in their LLMs, reporting that, “Based on this evaluation, we find that our models stay near-objective on neutral or slightly slanted prompts, and exhibit moderate bias in response to challenging, emotionally charged prompts. When bias does present, it most often involves the model expressing personal opinions, providing asymmetric coverage or escalating the user with charged language.”

10. Books and TV shows I’m paying attention to: I love Netflix’s new series, Famous Last Words, where they interview someone famous but don’t play it until after they die. Jane Goodall kicks it off. I was in tears listening to her final message (and appreciated that she had a whiskey with her while she did it.) Cory Doctorow’s new book, “Enshittification,” just came out as did Meta Chief Marketing Officer Alex Schultz’s “Click Here: The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising.”