In the AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment

Published

1 year ago

April 29, 2024

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Joanna Andreasson/DALL-E4

I’m an AI developer and consultant, and when OpenAI released a preview in February of its text-to-video model Soraan AI capable of generating cinema-quality videosI started getting urgent requests from the entertainment industry and from investment firms. You could divide the calls into two groups. Group A was concerned about how quickly AI was going to disrupt a current business model. Group B wanted to know if there was an opportunity to get a piece of the disruptive action.

Counterintuitively, the venture capitalists and showbiz people were equally split across the groups. Hollywood producers who were publicly decrying the threat of AI were quietly looking for ways to capitalize on it. Tech startups that thought they had an inside track to disrupting Hollywood were suddenly concerned thattheywere about to be disrupted by a technical advance they didn’t see coming.

This is the new normal: Even the disruptors are afraid they’re about to be disrupted. We’re headed for continuous disruption, both for old industries and new ones. But we’re also headed for the longest period of economic growth and lowest unemployment in historyprovided we don’t screw it up.

As AI and robotics accelerate in capabilities and find their way into virtually every corner of our economy, the prospects for human labor have never been better. Because of AI-driven economic growth, demand for human workers will increase; virtually anyone wanting to enter the work force will have opportunities to find meaningful, well-compensated careers. How we look at work will change, and the continuous disruption will cause a lot of anxiety. But the upside will be social improvements to levels we cannot currently comprehend. Roles and jobs may shift more frequently, but it will be easier to switch and more lucrative to do so.

While some of my peers in artificial intelligence have suggested AI could eliminate the need for work altogether and that we should explore alternative economic models like a universal basic income, I think proposals like that don’t take into account the historic effect of automation on the economy and how economic growth increases the demand for labor.

History and basic economics both suggest that AI will not make human beings economically irrelevant. AI and robotics will keep growing the economy, because they continuously increase productivity and efficiency. As the economy grows, there’s always going to be a widening gap between demand and capacity. Demand for human labor willincreaseeven when AI and robotics are superior and more efficient, precisely because there won’t be enough AI and robots to meet the growing needs. Economic Growth Is Accelerated by Technology

The goal of commercial AI and robotics is to create efficienciesthat is, to do something more inexpensively than prior methods, whether by people or machines. You use an industrial robot to weld a car because a human welder would take too long and wouldn’t have near the precision. You use ChatGPT to help write a grant proposal because it saves you time and means you don’t have to pay someone else to help write it.

With an increase in efficiency, you can either lower prices or not lower prices and buy a private island. If you don’t lower prices, you run the risk of competition from someone who sees their own path to a private island through your profits. As Amazon’s Jeff Bezos oncesaid, “Your margin is my opportunity.” In a free market, you usually don’t get to reap high margins forever. Eventually, someone else uses price to compete.

Along with this competition comes growth, which also drives innovation. The computer add-on boards used for the Halo and Call of Duty games turned out to be really useful for the kind of computations it takes to produce an AI like ChatGPT. Thanks to that quirk of mathematics, Nvidia was able to add $2 trillion to its market cap over the last five years, and we were saved from the drudgery of writing lengthy emails and other repetitive text tasks. Along with that market cap came huge profits. Nvidia is now using those profits to fund research into everything from faster microchips to robotics. Other large companies, such as Microsoft and Google, are also pouring profits into new startups focusing on AI, health, and robotics. All of this causes economic growth and cheaper and/or better goods.

Even with continuous technological disruption displacing and destroying other industries, the United States gross domestic product has more than doubled over the last 20 years, from $11 trillion to $27 trillion. If you compare the U.S. to the slightly more technophobic European Union, you can make the case that Europe’s limits to technologic growththrough legislation and through risk-averse investment strategiesis one of the factors causingslower economic growth(Europe’s growth rate was 45.61 percent compared with 108.2 percent in the U.S.).

This was the problem India created for itself after achieving independence in 1948. The government enacted so many laws to protect jobs (the “License Raj”) that it stalled the country’s economic development for decades, nearly lost millions to famine, and got eclipsed by the Chinese.

If technology is a driving force for economic growth, mixing in superintelligent AI means accelerated growth. Even if there are periods of technological stagnationwhich is doubtfulapplying current AI automation methods will improve efficiencies across industries. If H&R Block could replace 90 percent of its seasonal employees with AI, it would see its profits skyrocket, given that labor is its biggest expense. Those profits would be reallocated elsewhere, that would increase the potential for even more economic growth, and that would in turn create better opportunities for the accountants.

What about physical labor? Outsourcing jobs overseas is just the final step before they’re outsourced out of existence by robotics. If you don’t have to build your product on the other side of the planet, you have efficiency in both cost and time to market. The less time goods spend in shipping containers crossing the Pacific, the more available capital you have. More capital means more growth.

If the last several hundred years of economic history are any indication, AI and robotics are going to increase the total surface area of the economy faster than we can comprehend. The more intense the disruptionlike the assembly line, electrical power, or the internetthe greater the gains. There’s not much evidence to expect anything other than huge economic growth if we continue to improve efficiency and see an acceleration as AI systems and robotics keep improving.

But what about the workers? A fast-growing economy alone doesn’t guarantee that every labor sector will benefitbut other factors come into play that might. An image generated using the prompt, “Illustration of AI as a doctor, teacher, poet, scientist, warlord, actor, journalist, artist, and coder.” (Illustration: Joanna Andreasson/DALL-E4) New Jobs at a Scale We Can’t Predict

While innovation may eliminate the need for certain kinds of labor in one sector of the economy (farm equipment reduced the demand for farmworkers) it usually comes with an increase in competition for labor in other areas (increased agricultural productivity helped drive the growth of industrialization and the demand for factory workers). This allows us to switch from lower-paying jobs to higher-paying ones. Higher-paying jobs generally mean ones where innovation either leverages your physical capability (moving from the shovel to a bulldozer) or amplifies your cognitive output (going from paper ledgers to electronic spreadsheets).

Predicting how this will happen is hard, because we are really bad at imagining the future. To understand where we are headed, we have to get out of the mindset that the future is just the present with robots and weird clothes.

The first photograph of a person is believed to have been taken in 1838. Imagine trying to explain to a portrait artist at that time that photography not only didnotmean the death of his occupation but that this invention would lead to an entirely new medium, motion pictures, where an artist like James Cameron would work with a crew of thousands to shootAvatar(2009), a film that would cost (in unadjusted dollars) more to produce than the entire 1838 U.S. military budget and would gross more than the entire gross national product of that period. The number of people who worked directly onAvengers: Endgame(4,308) was more than half the size of the United States Army in 1838 (7,958).

The future is bigger than we can imagine.

Change is equally hard to comprehend. Two centuries ago, 80 percent of the U.S. population worked on farms. If you told one of those farmers that in 2024 barely 1 percent of the population would work on farms, he’d have a difficult time imagining what the other 79 percent of the population would do with their time. If you then tried to explain what an average income could purchase in the way of a Netflix subscription, airplane transportation, and a car, he’d think you were insane. The same principle applies to imagining life 50 years from now.

Amazon was already a public company in 1998, when the economist and future Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman predicted: “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine.” Amazon is now the second-largest employer in the United States, and its cloud service powers just about everything we now do online. Although we might be able to predict the possibility of disruption, accurately gauging the transformation it brings is still impossible.

While technology causes disruption across industries and shrinks many of them, it also expands the labor force in unexpected ways. A quarter-century ago, it may have seemed inconceivable that more people would work for a startup like Google than General Motors. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, now has 182,502 employees; GM has 163,000. More people work for Apple (161,000) than McDonald’s (150,000). MetaFacebook’s parent companyhas more employees than ABC, CBS, NBC, and Foxcombined(67,000 vs. 66,000).

And they aren’t all programmers. At Microsoft, fewer than half the employees are software engineers. For a conglomerate like Amazon, the percentage is even less. Amazon has tens of thousands of people delivering packages, and Apple has human staff working in physical storesdespite the fact the company also sells online. While Amazon might try to shrink its human labor force via robotics, Apple is increasing it. When Apple launched retail stores, experts told them this was ill-advised, that shopping was all moving online. But Apple understood that some decisions required a physical presence and a human touch. If you want to talk to a Google or Meta employee, good luck. If you want to talk to someone from Apple, just go to your nearest shopping mall. Apple bet on technological innovationsandhuman beings, and it now has greater net profit last year than Meta and Google combined ($100 billion).

The demand is so large for technically skilled people that companies are constantly pushing for an increase in the number of H-1B visas awarded each year. At any given time, the tech industry has approximately 100,000 unfilled jobs. Outside of bubbles and recessions, people laid off from tech companies generally find new jobs very quickly.

Economic growth also spurs new demand for traditional industries, such as construction. A million robots would barely make a dent upgrading the United States infrastructure, let alone globally. We’re going to need more human foremen and site supervisors than we’re capable of producing.

If we accept that the future economy is going to be much bigger than today’s and that entirely new categories of jobs will be createdeven in companies working hard to replace us with robotswe still have to accept the argument that many current occupations will go away. The skills you and I currently possess may become obsolete. Yet there are reasons to believe people at all stages of their career paths will have an easier and more rewarding experience switching jobs than ever before. The Retraining Myth

When President Joe Biden said that “Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program,” he might have been making a big assumption about what kind of labor the future will need and the types of jobs we will want. When we talk about job retraining, we should think about it in the context of an assembly-line worker learning how to do HVAC repair or a cashier learning how to do customer service for a car company.

Research on job retraining looks pretty bleak at first glance. The U.S. government spends about $20 billion a year on job programs and has very little data to support how effective that is. When you dig deeper into the data, you find that there’s very little correlation between dollars spent on these programs and wage increases among the people who use them. Because of this, most labor economists argue that job retraining doesn’t work.

Yet people learn new skills and switch careers all the time. Switching roles within a company requires retraining, and similar roles at different companies may be very different in practice. Retraining in practice works extremely well. What people really mean when they say “job retraining doesn’t work” is that it’s not that effective when the town factory closes and a government program materializes to help the unemployed workers find new jobs.

When you look into job retraining data, it becomes apparent that there’s not a single catchall solution that works in every situation for every person. The most effective efforts are ones that find close matches for skills by providing consultation and resources, offer hands-on apprenticeship training so people can adapt on the job, and ease people into new skills while they’re still employed. Artificial intelligence might end up playing a role here too: A study I commissioned while at Open-AI suggested that AI-assisted education can reduce the fear of embarrassment in learning new skills. ChatGPT will never judge you, no matter how dumb the question.

Those people who want well-paying careers and are willing to learn the skills will find jobs. By and large, even a 59-year-old won’t have trouble finding meaningful work.

If that still sounds like a stretch, consider this: We have solid data that in a high-growth economy, job retraining can pull differently skilled and previously unemployable people into the work force in record numbers. The lowest unemployment rate in U.S. history was 0.8 percent in October 1944. That basically meant everyone who wanted a job and wasn’t living in a shack surrounded by 100 miles of desert had a job. This included millions of women who didn’t previously have opportunities to work outside the home. They were put into factories and assembly lines to fill the gap left by soldiers sent overseas and helped expand our production to new levels that didn’t exist before.

Was World War II an outlier? Yes: It was a situation where there was so much demand for labor that we were pulling every adult we could into the work force. The demand in an AI-driven economy will be just as great, if not greater.

But won’t we just use AI and robots to fill all those gaps? The short answer: no. The demand for labor and knowledge work will always be greater than the supply. Never Enough Computers and Robots

David Ricardo, the classical economist, explained more than 200 years ago why we shouldn’t fear robots taking over.

No, those weren’t his precise words. But his theory of comparative advantage explained that even when you’re able to produce something at extreme efficiency, it can make mathematical sense to trade with less-efficient producers. He used the example of why England should buy port wine from Portugal even though they could make it more cheaply domestically. If England made more profit on producing textiles, it made the most economic sense to dedicate its resources to textiles and use the surpluses to slightly overpay for wine from another country. It’s basic math, yet government economists will huddl around a conference room table arguing that you need to keep all production domestic while ordering out for a pizza instead of making it themselveseven if one of them happens to be a fantastic cook.

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, we had no idea what to expect. I remember sitting in on a meeting debating the impact this “low-key research preview” would have. We came to the conclusion that it would be minor. We were wrong: ChatGPT became an instant hit, and it soon had more than 100,000,000 users. It was the fastest adoption of an application by a startup in history. This was great, except for one problem: We couldn’t meet the demand.

There weren’t enough computers on the planet to handle all of the users wanting access to ChatGPT. OpenAI had to use its supercomputer clusters intended to train newer AI systems to help support the need for compute. As Google and other companies realized the market potential for AI assistants like ChatGPT, they began to ramp up their efforts and increased the demand for compute even more. This is why Nvidia added $2 trillion to its market cap. People quickly realized this demand wasn’t going to slow down. It was going to accelerate.

The goal of commercial AI is to efficiently replace cognitive tasks done in the workplace, from handling a customer service complaint to designing your fall product line. This means replacing neurons with transistors. The paradox is that once you maximize the efficiency of something like producing farming equipment, you end up creating new economic opportunities, because of the surpluses. Overall demand increases, not decreases. Even with robots building robots and AI creating new business opportunities, we’ll always be short of hands and minds. Even lesser-skilled human talent will be in demand. Just like we needed everyone to participate in the wartime economy, we didn’t reach nearzero unemployment because it was a nice thing to do; because of comparative advantage, it made the most economic sense.

When the Manhattan Project ran out of mathematicians, the government recruited from the clerical staff to do computations. The same happened at Bletchley Park with code breaking, and again two decades later at NASA. While today’s computers handle advanced computations so fast that they can solve a problem before you can explain it to a person, we now cram mathematicians into rooms with whiteboards and have them think up new things for the computers to do guided by our needs. AI won’t change that. Companies are actively building systems to function as AI researchers. They’ll eventually be smarter than the people who made themyet that will lead to demand for even more human AI researchers.

Even people in AI have trouble understanding this argument. They can make persuasive cases why AI and robotics will supersede human capabilities in just about every way, but they give blank looks to arguments about why the demand for intelligence and labor will always be greater than the supply. They can imagine AI replacing our way of doing things, but they have trouble understanding how it will grow demand at such a rate we’ll still need dumb, clumsy people. The publicity around high-end computer shortages and the realization that we can’t meet present demand, let alone future demand, should hopefully make people consider this in practical economic considerations.

Conversations about how to shape a future economy with concepts like the universal basic income are worth havingbut they’re trying to solve a problem that probably won’t exist in the way that some people foresee. Human beings will be a vital part of economic development well into the future.

Nobody in 1838 saw motion pictures or the likes of James Cameron coming, let alone the concept of a “video game.” Our near future is just as difficult to predict. But one thing seems certain: You might not need a job in 2074, but there will be one if you want it.

Entertainment

P Diddy: Everything you need to know about the Sean Combs trial

Published

2 hours ago

May 5, 2025

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P Diddy: Everything you need to know about the Sean Combs trial

Seven months after his high-profile arrest, the trial of hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs is set to get under way today.

A three-time Grammy winner and one of the most influential hip-hop producers of the past 30 years – also known variously as Puff Daddy, P Diddy and “Love” in the years since he rose to fame in the 1990s – the rapper and founder of Bad Boy Records is now facing serious criminal charges in the US, as well as several civil lawsuits.

He has pleaded not guilty to criminal charges, said his sexual relationships were consensual, and strenuously denied all allegations of wrongdoing.

Combs, 55, was arrested and charged in September 2024, six months after raids by federal agents on two of his properties in Los Angeles and Miami. He has been held in detention in New York since his arrest, having been refused bail as he awaits trial.

Jury selection is set to begin this morning and will potentially take several days. Opening statements by lawyers and the start of the testimony are expected to begin next week.

Here is everything you need to know.

What is Combs on trial for?

Combs is facing five felony charges:

• Racketeering conspiracy
• Two counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion
• Two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution

The rapper was initially charged with three offences – racketeering, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution. Two extra counts – one each of sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution – were added earlier in April.

Combs has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Racketeering broadly means engaging in an illegal scheme or enterprise, and the charge falls under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act (RICO) in the US.

According to the US justice department’s definition of RICO statute, it is also illegal to “conspire to violate” the laws.

The indictment against Combs alleges that between 2008 and 2024, he “led a racketeering conspiracy that engaged in sex trafficking, forced labour, kidnapping, arson, bribery, and obstruction of justice, among other crimes”, the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York said following his arrest in September.

Who are the accusers?

Prosecutors expect four accusers to testify against Combs during the criminal trial.

Three have requested their identities not be revealed to the press or the public and that they instead be referred to using only pseudonyms.

One accuser, who is referred to as Victim 1 in court documents, is prepared to testify under her own name, prosecutors have said.

When did allegations begin?

In November 2023, Combs’ former girlfriend, R’n’B star Cassie – full name Casandra Ventura – filed a civil lawsuit alleging she was trafficked, raped, plied with drugs and viciously beaten by the rapper on many occasions over the course of 10 years.

The lawsuit was settled the following day. Terms of the agreement were not made public but there was no admission of wrongdoing from Combs, and he issued a statement saying he “vehemently” denied the “offensive and outrageous” allegations.

Six months later, footage recorded at a hotel in Los Angeles in 2016 emerged, allegedly showing Combs hitting and kicking Cassie in a hallway.

Shortly afterwards, he released a video apology, saying his behaviour in the video was at a time when he had “hit rock bottom” but nonetheless was “inexcusable” and that he was “disgusted” with himself.

The rapper’s lawyers argue the footage was nothing more than a “glimpse into a complex but decade-long consensual relationship”.

Details of ‘freak offs’

The charges include details of alleged “freak offs” – described as “elaborate and produced sex performances that Combs arranged, directed, masturbated during, and often electronically recorded”.

He allegedly induced female victims and male sex workers into drug-fuelled sexual performances, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors allege victims were given controlled substances during the sometimes days-long events to keep them “obedient and compliant” and Combs subjected them to “physical, emotional, and verbal abuse” to get them to engage.

The indictment also alleges Combs “engaged in acts of violence, threats of violence, threats of financial and reputational harm, and verbal abuse” including kidnapping and arson when witnesses of his alleged abuse threatened his authority or reputation.

What happens first?

The hearing is set to begin with jury selection at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York in Lower Manhattan.

After the two additional charges were added, Combs’ legal team requested a delay of two months, saying they needed more time to prepare his defence. However, Judge Arun Subramanian, who will hear the trial, denied the request, saying it had been made too close to the start date.

So, the trial will go ahead as planned, starting with jury selection. This is currently scheduled to take a week, but as a high-profile case, this process may be complicated and take some time.

If jury selection goes to plan, the opening statements from the prosecution and defence are set to begin on Monday 12 May.

Lawyers for Combs have requested for potential jurors to be asked about their views regarding sex, drugs, alcohol, and violence in a questionnaire.

In a letter submitted to the judge, the rapper’s legal team said: “Because this trial involves content that is sensitive and private in nature, many individuals are uncomfortable speaking about these issues in front of others and would be more candid writing about them in a questionnaire.”

Examples of areas “requiring inquiry” are potential connections to “drug or alcohol abuse… domestic violence, their willingness to watch videos with physical assault and videos that are sexually explicit, and their views towards people with multiple sexual partners”, they said.

They also want potential jurors to say if they have watched documentaries released about Combs since the charges were announced.

Prosecutors criticised the defence’s proposed questionnaire – with 72 questions – as too long and touching on subjects that would be better asked in person by the judge, if at all.

What has Combs said?

The rapper has strongly denied all the allegations against him.

Following his initial court appearance in September, one of his lawyers, Marc Agnifilo, said the rapper would “fight this to the end,” that he was “not afraid” of the charges, and was “looking forward to clearing his name”.

“Eventually he’s going to be shown to be innocent,” Mr Agnifilo said.

In a document submitted in February, Combs’ legal team argued for the transportation charge to be dismissed, saying he had been subject to a “racist” prosecution “for conduct that regularly goes unpunished”, and that he was being “singled out” as “a powerful black man” over the use of escorts.

They argued that “no white person” had ever “been the target of a remotely similar prosecution” and said that while the rapper had “complicated relationships with significant others as well as with alcohol and drugs… that doesn’t make him a racketeer, or a sex trafficker”.

Are the criminal charges separate to the lawsuits?

Yes. Combs has also been hit with dozens of civil claims – a few filed before the criminal charges were announced, but the majority afterwards.

These include accusations of sexual abuse by men and women, from alleged victims who were as young as 10 at the time of the alleged incidents.

Many of these have been filed by Texas lawyer Tony Buzbee, whom Combs’ team have accused of seeking publicity.

One particularly high-profile lawsuit, involving rapper Jay-Z as well as Combs, was voluntarily dropped with prejudice, meaning it cannot be brought again, by the accuser in February.

Another lawsuit accuses Combs of raping a woman as alleged payback for her saying she believed he was involved in the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur. Combs is suing the lawyer involved in this case for defamation, over other allegations that have been made against him.

What sentence does Combs face?

The US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York announced details of potential sentences when Combs was charged, but said the decision would ultimately be determined by the judge.

Racketeering conspiracy carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, the attorney’s office said, as does sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion – which also carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in prison.

The charge of transportation for purposes of prostitution carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

Sports

This time at UCF, Scott Frost won’t need to catch lightning in a bottle

Published

2 hours ago

May 5, 2025

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This time at UCF, Scott Frost won't need to catch lightning in a bottle

Andrea AdelsonMay 3, 2025, 09:58 AM ET
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- ACC reporter.
- Joined ESPN.com in 2010.
- Graduate of the University of Florida.

ORLANDO, Fla. — Scott Frost walks into the UCF football building and into his office, the one he used the last time he had this job, eight years ago. The shades are drawn, just like they used to be. There are drawings from his three kids tacked to the walls. There are still trophies sitting on a shelf.

He still parks in the same spot before he walks into that same building and sits at the same desk. The only thing that has changed is that the desk is positioned in a different part of the room.

But the man doing all the same things at the University of Central Florida is a different Scott Frost than the one who left following that undefeated 2017 season to take the head coach job at Nebraska.

UCF might look the same, but the school is different now, too. The Knights are now in a Power 4 conference, and there is now a 12-team College Football Playoff that affords them the opportunity to play for national championships — as opposed to self-declaring them. Just outside his office, construction is underway to upgrade the football stadium. The same, but different.

“I know I’m a wiser person and smarter football coach,” Frost said during a sit-down interview with ESPN. “When you’re young, you think you have it all figured out. I don’t think you really get better as a person unless you go through really good things, and really bad things. I just know I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

Out on the practice field, Frost feels the most at home — he feels comfort in going back to the place that has defined nearly every day of his life. As a young boy, he learned the game from his mom and dad, both football coaches, then thrived as a college and NFL player before going into coaching.

He coaches up his players with a straightforwardness that quarterbacks coach McKenzie Milton remembers fondly from their previous time together at UCF. Milton started at quarterback on the 2017 undefeated team, and the two remained close after Frost left.

“I see the same version of him from when I was here as a player,” Milton said. “Even though the dynamic in college football has changed dramatically with the portal and NIL, I think Coach Frost is one of the few coaches that can still bring a group of guys together and turn them into a team, just with who he is and what he’s done and what he’s been through in his life. He knows what it looks like to succeed, both as a coach and a player.”

Since his return, Frost has had to adjust to those changes to college football, but he said, “I love coming into work every day. We’ve got the right kids who love football. We’re working them hard. They want to be pushed. They want to be challenged. We get to practice with palm trees and sunshine and, we’re playing big-time football. But it’s also just not the constant stress meat grinder of some other places.”

Meat grinder of some other places.

Might he mean a place such as Nebraska?

“You can think what you want,” Frost said. “One thing I told myself — I’m never going to talk about that. It just doesn’t feel good to talk about. I’ll get asked 100 questions. This is about UCF. I just don’t have anything to say.”

Frost says he has no regrets about leaving UCF, even though he didn’t get the results he had hoped for at his alma mater. When Nebraska decided to part ways with coach Mike Riley in 2017, Frost seemed the best, most obvious candidate to replace him. He had been the starting quarterback on the 1997 team, the last Nebraska team to win a national title.

He now had the coaching résumé to match. Frost had done the unthinkable at UCF — taking a program that was winless the season before he arrived, to undefeated and the talk of the college football world just two years later.

But he could not ignore the pull of Nebraska and the opportunities that came along with power conference football.

“I was so happy here,” Frost said. “We went undefeated and didn’t get a chance to win a championship, at least on the field. You are always striving to reach higher goals. I had always told myself I wasn’t going to leave here unless there was a place that you can legitimately go and win a national championship. It was a tough decision because I didn’t want to leave regardless of which place it was.”

Indeed, Frost maintains he was always happy at UCF. But he also knew returning to Nebraska would make others happy, too.

“I think I kind of knew that wasn’t best for me,” he said. “It was what some other people wanted me to do to some degree.”

In four-plus seasons with the Cornhuskers, Frost went 16-31 — including 5-22 in one-score games. He was fired three games into the 2022 season after a home loss to Georgia Southern.

After Frost was fired, he moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where his wife has family. He reflected on what happened during his tenure with the Cornhuskers but also about what he wanted to do with the rest of his career. He tried to stay connected to the game, coaching in the U.S. Army Bowl, a high school all-star game in Frisco, Texas, in December 2022. Milton coached alongside him, and distinctly remembers a conversation they had.

“He said, ‘It’s my goal to get back to UCF one day,'” Milton said. “At that time, I was like, ‘I pray to God that happens.'”

If that was the ultimate goal, Frost needed to figure out how to position himself to get back there. While he contemplated his future, he coached his son’s flag football team to a championship. Frost found the 5- and 6-year-olds he coached “listen better than 19-year-olds sometimes.”

Ultimately, he decided on a career reboot in the NFL. Frost had visited the Rams during their offseason program, and when a job came open in summer 2024, Rams coach Sean McVay immediately reached out.

Frost was hired as a senior analyst, primarily helping with special teams but also working with offense and defense.

“It was more just getting another great leader in the building, someone who has been a head coach, that has wisdom and a wealth of experience to be able to learn from,” McVay told ESPN. “His ability to be able to communicate to our players from a great coaching perspective, but also have the empathy and the understanding from when he played — all of those things were really valuable.”

McVay said he and Frost had long discussions about handling the challenges that come with falling short as a head coach.

“There’s strength in the vulnerability,” McVay said. “I felt that from him. There’s a real power in the perspective that you have from those different experiences. If you can really look at some of the things that maybe didn’t go down the way you wanted to within the framework of your role and responsibility, real growth can occur. I saw that in him.”

Frost says his time with the Rams rejuvenated him.

“It brought me back,” Frost said. “Sometimes when you’re a head coach or maybe even a coordinator, you forget how fun it is to be around the game when it’s not all on you all the time. What I did was a very small part, and we certainly weren’t going to win or lose based on every move that I made, and I didn’t have to wear the losses and struggle for the victories like you do when you’re a head coach. I’m so grateful to those guys.”

UCF athletics director Terry Mohajir got a call from then-head coach Gus Malzahn last November. Malzahn, on the verge of finishing his fourth season at UCF, was contemplating becoming offensive coordinator at Florida State. Given all the responsibilities on his desk as head coach — from NIL to the transfer portal to roster management — he found the idea of going back to playcalling appealing. Mohajir started preparing a list of candidates and was told Thanksgiving night that Malzahn had planned to step down.

Though Frost previously worked at UCF under athletics director Danny White, he and Mohajir had a preexisting relationship. Mohajir said he reached out to Frost after he was fired at Nebraska to gauge his interest in returning to UCF as offensive coordinator under Malzahn. But Frost was not ready.

This time around, Mohajir learned quickly that Frost had interest in returning as head coach. Mohajir called McVay and Rams general manager Les Snead. They told him Frost did anything that was asked of him, including making copies around the office.

“They said, ‘You would never know he was the head coach at a major college program.” Mohajir also called former Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts to get a better understanding about what happened with the Cornhuskers.

“Fits are a huge piece, and not everybody fits,” Mohajir said.

After eight conversations, Mohajir decided he wanted to meet Frost in person. They met at an airport hotel in Dallas.

“He was motivated,” Mohajir said. “We went from coast to coast, talked to coordinators, head coaches, pro guys, all kinds of different folks. And at the end of the day, I really believe that Scott wanted the job the most.”

The first day back in Orlando, Dec. 8, was a blur. Frost woke up at 3:45 a.m. in California to be able to make it to Florida in time for his introductory news conference with his family.

When they pulled into the campus, his first time back since he left in 2017, Frost said he was in a fog. It took another 24 hours for him and his wife, Ashley, to take a deep exhale.

“Rather than bouncing around chasing NFL jobs, we thought maybe we would be able to plant some roots here and have our kids be in a stable place for a while at a place that I really enjoyed coaching and that I think it has a chance to evolve into a place that could win a lot of football games,” Frost said. “All that together was just enough to get me to come back.”

The natural question now is whether Frost can do what he did during his first tenure.

That 2017 season stands as the only winning season of his head coaching career, but it carries so much weight with UCF fans because of its significance as both the best season in school history, and one that changed both its own future and college football.

After UCF finished 13-0, White self-declared the Knights national champions. Locked out of the four-team playoff after finishing No. 12 in the final CFP standings, White started lobbying for more attention to be paid to schools outside the power conferences.

That season also positioned UCF to pounce during the next wave of realignment. Sure enough, in 2023, the Knights began play in a Power 4 conference for the first time as Big 12 members. This past season, the CFP expanded to 12 teams. Unlike 2017, UCF now has a defined path to play for a national title and no longer has to go undefeated and then pray for a shot. Win the Big 12 championship, no matter the record, and UCF is in the playoff.

But Frost cautions those who expect the clock to turn back to 2017.

“I don’t think there’s many people out there that silly,” Frost said. “People joke about that with me, that they’re going to expect you go into undefeated in the first year. I think the fans are a little more realistic than that.”

The game, of course, is different. Had the transfer portal and NIL existed when Frost was at UCF during his first tenure, he might not have been able to keep the 2017 team together. The 2018 team, which went undefeated under Josh Heupel before losing to LSU in the Fiesta Bowl, might not have stayed together, either.

This upcoming season, UCF will receive a full share of television revenue from the Big 12, after receiving a half share (estimated $18 million) in each of his first two seasons. While that is more than what it received in the AAC, it is less than what other Big 12 schools received, making it harder to compete immediately. It also struggled with NIL funding. As a result, in its first two years in the conference, UCF went 5-13 in Big 12 play and 10-15 overall.

Assuming the House v. NCAA settlement goes into effect this summer, Mohajir says UCF is aiming to spend the full $20.5 million, including fully funding football.

“It’s like we moved to the fancy neighborhood, and we got a job that’s going to pay us money over time, and we’re going to do well over time, but we’re stretching a little to be there right now, and that requires a lot of effort from a lot of people and a lot of commitment from a lot of people,” Frost said. “So far, the help that we’ve gotten has been impressive.”

Mohajir points out that UCF has had five coaching changes over the past 10 years, dating back to the final season under George O’Leary in 2015, when the Knights went 0-12. Frost says he wants to be in for the long term, and Mohajir hopes consistency at head coach will be an added benefit. Mohajir believes UCF is getting the best of Frost in this moment and scoffs at any questions about whether rehiring him will work again.

“Based on what I’m seeing right now, it will absolutely work,” Mohajir said. “But I don’t really look at it as ‘working again.’ It’s not ‘again.’ It’s, ‘Will it work?’ Because it’s a different era.”

To that end, Frost says success is not recreating 2017 and going undefeated. Rather, Frost said, “If our group now can help us become competitive in the Big 12, and then, from time to time, compete for championships and make us more relevant nationally, I think we’ll have done our job to help catapult UCF again.”

You could say he is looking for the same result. He’s just taking a different route there.

Sports

Ex-Cougar Haulcy, top transfer safety, picks LSU

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2 hours ago

May 5, 2025

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Ex-Cougar Haulcy, top transfer safety, picks LSU

Max OlsonMay 4, 2025, 11:06 PM ET
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- Covers the Big 12
- Joined ESPN in 2012
- Graduate of the University of Nebraska

Houston transfer safety A.J. Haulcy committed to LSU on Sunday, his agency, A&P Sports, told ESPN.

Haulcy, the top player still available and No. 1 safety in ESPN’s spring transfer portal rankings, committed to the Tigers after taking an official visit Sunday. Miami, Ole Miss and SMU were also contenders for his pledge.

The 6-foot, 215-pound senior defensive back has started 32 games over his three college seasons and earned first-team All-Big 12 honors in 2024 after producing 74 tackles, 8 pass breakups and 5 interceptions, which tied for most in the conference.

LSU has assembled one of the top incoming transfer classes in the country this offseason with 18 signees, including six players — wide receivers Barion Brown (Kentucky) and Nic Anderson (Oklahoma), linemen Braelin Moore (Virginia Tech) and Josh Thompson (Northwestern), cornerback Mansoor Delane (Virginia Tech) and defensive end Patrick Payton (LSU) — who ranked among the top 60 in ESPN’s winter transfer rankings.

The Tigers also landed USF transfer Bernard Gooden, one of the most coveted defensive tackles in the spring transfer window.

Haulcy began his career at New Mexico in 2022, earning a starting role as a true freshman and recording 87 tackles, including a career-high 24 against Fresno State, and two interceptions. The Houston native entered the transfer portal at the end of the season and came home to play for the Cougars.

As a sophomore in 2023, Haulcy recorded a team-high 98 tackles and received votes for Big 12 Defensive Newcomer of the Year from the league’s coaches.

Haulcy chose to re-enter the portal April 21 after Houston’s spring game, as did starting cornerback Jeremiah Wilson, who’ll continue his career at Florida State. Wilson and Haulcy were the Nos. 11 and 12 players, respectively, in ESPN’s spring transfer rankings.