US Lost 108K Jobs in Jan 2026, Most Gone Forever (AI)

So, I hate to be the news, but I think it is now abundantly clear that AI is directly impacting both job loss and new job creation across most developed nations in the world. The United States just announced about 110,000 layoffs for the month of January. And the most interesting part of all this to me is they announced only around 5,000 new jobs planned. That is a ratio of less than 1 in 20 new jobs created to old jobs lost. This is like South Korean levels of decline. in here. It is faking white collar genocide. And it's bad for people out in America predominantly because it's probably one of the highest labor productivity countries on Earth and then it's also one of the least regulated economies on Earth. But if you think this is happening just in America, oh boy, partner, buckle up, cuz y'all got another thing coming. Now, this particular headline was the highest number of job losses in a January all the way back to 2009. Uh, I think it was also the lowest number of new jobs planned for basically the entirety since these guys have been tracking. And I bring it up because it's indicative of where all of this stuff is going. Like we do not have much time left as you know white collar knowledge workers. The reality is models nowadays are basically better than us at everything. And I don't mean to say that this is some far-flung science fiction future idea. When's the last time that you ever did an international math olympiad problem? Probably never, right? Well, models are now capable of doing these sorts of things in minutes. How about solving these super complex Aeros problems? These things are basically the summation or maybe even like the multiplication of all knowledge that all humans have ever generated over the course of our lives up until now. At least knowledge that is directly indexable. So, it's not surprising that like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts or whatever freaking quote you want to throw at. So, why am I bitching about this as somebody that uh you know owns my own business? And I'd imagine a big chunk of the people that watch my channel also own their own businesses

right? I talk about AI automation and starting a new agency and and all that stuff. Um, you know, a while ago, I made the decision to run my own business because I figured that it would make more sense for my salary not to come from one person, but 100 people, because obviously if it comes from 100 people, it's a lot safer than if it comes from one person. If you lose your employer, that's 100% of your revenue, right? If you lose one out of a hundred of your clients, that's 1% of your revenue. Well, the reason I'm talking about this is because um this is not just going to impact people with full-time employment or people that are in the traditional 9 to5 sort of lane uh but but everybody on Earth. And really what all of this points towards is mass unemployment. The stark reality is models are already better than humans at most economically valuable work. It sucks for me to say, you know, I kind of get goosebumps every time I approach this uh sort of like blind spot in my own vision, but uh I think this is going to hit a lot of people very quickly. And so I might as well just share with you guys my own thoughts on that. Now, like when's the last time you guys coded in 30 different languages? I could code in maybe 0. 5. Well, can you summarize a thousand research papers in 15 minutes and then interpolate the results? I certainly freaking can't. These things have evolved past tools and they are now essentially capable of co-working with us on most economically valuable tasks at time horizons up to like three, four, even 5 hours. So I mean like it's not a question of if these things are better than us at most things. It's a question of how much better and also how much better they are going to be over the coming years as the exponential takeoff and exponential improvement in technology continues. Um anybody that's making a lot of money in the space treats it as a given. Why do you think all these freaking billionaires and AI all own their own islands and compounds and bunkers? Well, let me tell you, not all of them are doing Jeffrey Epstein level hy jinks in there. Uh, most of them are doing so because they foresee a future of mass unemployment and civil instability coming so quick and so fast that there's no other way to prepare for this other than getting themselves a nuclear silo a decade ago and stockpiling it with everything. This is not like a conspiracy theory, and I don't mean to worry people about this. Obviously, that's just one of many possible outcomes. But the civil instability that we're probably going to see as a result of increasing uh unemployment is going to be bigger and worse than anything I think anybody could have ever seen before. And I mean like the core of this is that AI is not like a factory machine, right? This is not the industrial revolution despite the fact that many people like to draw parallels between it. In the industrial revolution, if I was, you know, some fella creating, you know, handwoven baskets or whatnot and then some other fella invented a machine which handwo the hell out of those baskets much better than I, you know, there was a future for me, right? I might not be weaving the baskets directly, but maybe now what I'm doing is I'm overseeing the weaving of baskets in this factory. And um that was sort of the progression, right? We increase the leverage, we increase the levels of abstraction at which we do the thing. And you know in that way we get a flourishing economy. People still have jobs and so on and so forth. We just output more. Well, AI is not like that because with AI it's like let's say my core thing is I program computers, right? I make uh scripts for some backend thing and then you know it's like oh AI can now do that. So I'm just going to oversee the AI. Uh well guess what? Um AI is also better at overseeing the AI than you are. So what do you do? You take a step back and you think well I'm just going to orchestrate a bunch of AIs all acting in harmony. Well, guess what? AI is better at orchestrating other AIs who manage other AIs than you are as well. At a certain point, it's like where is our economic value? The biological substrate of our brains operates at like 1,000th the speed at which, you know, electricity travels through a wire. Um, there is just no feasible situation in which most humans will have any sort of economically valuable objective work that we can do better than AI models. And I'd go as far as to say that like we're almost at that point already. Um obviously there's the physical world to think about and so you know there's a big push towards robotics and that sort of thing and I think that's going to buy us some more time essentially in the current economic framework. But yeah man it is not looking good out there for most white collar workers and uh being somebody in you know a knowledge field being somebody that produces white collar uh deliverables and widgets and outputs uh you know this is something that I've had to come to terms with over the last little while. So, if I circle back to this idea of mass unemployment, um I think if we were being honest with ourselves, this whole idea of mass unemployment is not actually bad. Like, if you think about it, the theoretical goal of civilization should be to get us to 100% unemployment. Why? Because in the perfect world, in this space utopia, everybody would just do whatever we want to do. we would work uh you know based off passion and hopes and dreams not necessarily work to live not necessarily create these deliverables and widgets because we need to balance our checkbook at the end of the month right and whether or not you even want to define that as work I don't even know if that word is going to make sense in our

future but the reality is despite this being such an amazing goal for us to strive towards everybody being able to do things and not having to worry about actual sustenance us living in this fantastic postcar city society where AI manages the production and and more or less the evolution and continued progression of technology despite that being what I would consider to be a very good goal. um you know like our current economic system is just not properly equipped to handle any of that and this is the part at which you know I shy away from talking about stuff like this because logically speaking because immediately everybody's minds just goes towards like communism and these alternative economic systems which have been proven to be significantly inferior to you know free market capitalism over much of the last 200 or so years and you know I'm not going to sit here and glorify you know like socialist style or communist style economies. My parents fled from like the Soviet block 40 something years ago or so in search of a better life. And so I'm very familiar with all of the misgivings of that sort of system, at least the way that it was practically implemented. Um, but if you consider what happens when unemployment rises and people are unable to pay bills in an economic environment, there really is no other alternative than some fundamental shift in the way that we compensate or pay human beings. We need to find a way to divorce payments from economic value because if not, then the only things that will get any of future payments are models that are increasingly intelligent, more sophisticated, and better at managing transactions and objectively generating value than human beings are. It just doesn't really make any sense, right? In a world where you have $100 to spend and an AI agent is capable of giving you 1,000 products at the same level, whereas a human being is capable of giving you one product for that $100. Who are you going to pay? I mean, it's just it's classic game theory. Obviously, the optimal move is to pay for the most product with the least amount of money, right? And that's how the economy works. The entire economy is built on like a consumption loop, right? people will work then they will earn a bunch of money and then they will spend uh you know businesses will make that money they'll then hire people who then work and and it's just cyclical but when you remove the whole people work aspect of that loop everything breaks down and so this free market capitalism idea despite the fact that I think it's currently the superior system you know can't really continue in the same vein so just to throw some numbers at you the US economy is somewhere between 150 to 200 million employed I've heard various stats here like 140 million 160 million. I think it depends on like how you interpret the data and whatnot which I'm not necessarily going to do. So let's just like let's just you know ear market as 150 million. Um you know major AI consulting firms estimate that between 30 to 50% of current economically valuable work given the fact that the United States is primarily like a consulting knowledge sector economy 30 to 50% of this work can be outsourced. If we take even a very conservative view um 30% of 150 million is like you know let's just say it's like between 40 to 50 million. If over the course of the next 10 years we displace 40 to 50 million people and then we generate jobs at a rate of approximately 120th like we did in January which I think is honestly a very high uh estimate. I think it's going to be much lower than that probably one in 100. But that means that we're losing 50 million jobs and that we're gaining you know 2. 5 million jobs approximately right so total unemployment goes up at 47. 5 million or about 4 million a year. Uh historically speaking, if you look at any period of time in which employment has gotten to that point, not even total employment, mind you, usually youth employment, um people between, you know, the ages of like 20 to maybe like 35 or so. If you look historically at any period of time in which employment has unemployment has um racketed up to that level, you basically almost always have like atrocious Geneva Convention uh breaking level violence. You have total breakdown of the civil structure. You have people doing things that they would have considered animalistic just a couple years ago. Like look at um I mean look at the Arab Spring um in Tunisia. I think youth unemployment was like 25% or so. Didn't even hit 30%. Uh when Bizazzi set himself on fire and then you know more or less pushed through this massive revolution. People are doing things that they could not have even believed that they would be doing just a few months prior to that. But obviously you have to do what in order to survive when you have a big group of people that don't believe they have any upward mobility which I think is a very possible outcome of you know the AI economy class. Uh you know I mean like why do anything if models can do things 100,000 times better than you and 100,000 times cheaper, right? Like I mean I consider myself to have thought about this problem for a very long time and that demotivates and demoralizes the hell out of me. What about somebody that's like realizing this for the first time? It's going to be crazy. What about you know Germany back in the 30s? you know, unemployment was about between 20 to 30%. Um, immediately preceding the voting in of the Nazi party, and we all know how that ended. I mean, anytime you have like a big mass of people who just can't make ends meet, there's like a one toone correlation between that and then like the voting in of people that would be considered quite politically extreme just a few years prior. But the reality is people don't give a about like political extremism. They care about putting, you know, food on their table, feeding their families, and just making ends meet. And you know, I'm sure a big chunk of the people that voted for uh Mr. Hitler, this freaking genocidal maniac, they weren't bad people. They just saw him promising a bunch of solutions to problems that they were suffering from. And they said, "Well, better him than whatever else. Better him than what we're currently experiencing. Better, you know, the the grass on the other side of the fence than the grass over here. " We see this already, right? We have political polarization at levels that we haven't seen in several decades. We have people voting in what just a few years ago we would have considered to be the most uncou violent maniacs ever and then they do so with like their fists in the air and they're really stoked about it because you know of the promise of my own personal burdens being alleviated. It's not like a theory at this point. It's a very clear and austere political pattern. So, you know, I'm not going to sit here and say that uh the end of the world is coming or whatever, but I do think and I would agree with a lot of other thinkers in AI and whatnot, that most likely what's coming is a period of mass civil instability following increasing job loss and increasing automation of things like white collar

work. That mass civil instability is what's going to inevitably and eventually push us towards adopting some sort of new economic system where human compensation is more divorced from the direct economic value that we provide. I'm not you know Nostradamus you know but I don't think it takes Nostradamus to make this sort of claim. I think it's the same sort of thing we've seen secularly occur throughout history and AI is really just increasing the pace of that development. Now, I think if we can make it out to the other side of this, you know, terrible thread the eye of the needle sort of situation, you know, I think that boundless and limitless growth and prosperity will exist for everybody. But I think that it's going to be very difficult to do so. And there are a lot of people, actors, and forces out there that are constantly pushing us away from the eye of that needle. So, what would

an economic system like that actually look like? Um, you know, a lot of people have talked about universal basic income, which is sort of the idea that you just get paid for existing. And there have been a lot of studies on things like universal basic income, and they have unfortunately definitively shown that people tend to, you know, they tend to lose motivation. They tend to do significantly less. Their job satisfaction, life satisfaction, just in general satisfaction tends to go down when somebody pays for all of their needs. Uh I think a big chunk of that is sort of like the same thing that underlies a big chunk of modern like depression and uh you know like I don't know the pandemic of mental illness if that's what you want to call it although I think all that stuff is hyped up. you know, when you free people up to think more about their situation, there is unfortunately like a negative bias um in the human brain. And so, the more time we have available to consider our situation and think things like the deep meaning of life questions and what the hell I want to do, uh you know, typically speaking, the outcome of that is negative rather than positive. And there are a variety of reasons for this. As somebody that went to school for behavioral neuroscience, I think the main one is just that the human brain wasn't wired to sit around thinking all day. uh it was wired to get you to reproduce. And so if you are sitting around all day, presumably not reproducing, the brain will try and get you to do everything humanly possible to get out there and get that quick fix or quick hit of dopamine. And a lot of the time that involves you just feeling quite poorly. Uh I think future technology can help with that. But you know, that's one of the major caveats of the the UBI proposals that are being pushed out. I think another possible system is one where people get compensated for something that is analogous to economic productivity, but it is not economic productivity. And I'd encourage you guys that uh don't understand what I mean to think about this like 20,000 years ago, you're like a hunter gatherer, you know, on the planes and you're hunting buffalo or whatever the hell you're doing. I don't know. Um I don't actually know if 20,000 years ago they were hunting buffalo. I think they were. I went to a museum once. But anyway, uh, all of a sudden a little time machine opens up and somebody grabs you and puts you in like a modern cubicle and somebody explains to you like, "Hey, this is how people get paid now. " What are you going to think? You're a hunter gather. You're going to look around. You're going like, "Where's the hunting? Where's the gathering? I don't see you providing. Where's the food here, guys? " Right? These are all jobs. Why are you spending 8 hours sitting down? You're not doing anything that's actually valuable. Well, the current economic paradigm back then was obviously like, you know, most of it was sustenance-based. Same thing with like the agrarian economies um of you know 10,000 years or 20,000 years after that. You know, you pick a farmer up and you put them in front of me here recording my video and they're going to like, "What the hell are you doing? You're just talking to a camera, you do adult. " Like, "Go do something valuable. Go plant some freaking seeds. " Funny enough, my dad is still kind of like that cuz he grew up on a farm. Like, what are you doing? You're just twiddling your thumbs in front of your computer. Go do some real work. Here's a hammer. Uh but you know if you do that with somebody today and then you transport them into a post AGI future where we're in that postcar city economy guarantee you what we're going to do is we're probably going to think that that's a job as well. So the question is what are those jobs? Like what are those things that people will do that are sidebyside with economic productivity but not necessarily the same thing? Like what would I consider to objectively be something that improves economic productivity? Well that would be like research, right? um you know natural resource extraction. That would be like building infrastructure, building roads, stuff like that. These things objectively improve like our ability to grow, you know, GDP and then human prosperity. What would I consider something that is maybe analogous to that? Well, maybe some sort of like credit based system where human beings reward each other for, I don't know, displays of some value that human beings hold really dear, courage, bravery, something like that. I think like streaming culture and stuff like that is actually kind of analogous to that. Uh, you know, like what the hell are streamers doing? A lot of the time they just strap a camera on some fella and then walk around. Look at um Speed, right? This big streamer guy. I don't know if you guys know who he is, but he keeps on coming up my damn feed. You know, he's just making reaction faces and doing back flips. He's being funny. He's um I don't know. He's satisfying some visceral need for human connection. You know, a future economy could look like that. And so in addition to having our base needs met, there might be some additional credit based thing where people get paid for stuff like that. Um, which I think would be far better than UBI because it would still give people at least some sense of, you know, working towards something. I think progress is really

important. You know, some sort of AI productivity tax like Bernie Sanders uh has talked quite a bit about is possible although obviously that's more UBI based. Uh there are a variety of ways that I think we could build in systems to still provide people a reasonable amount of autonomy, freedom, but also meaning that still make us, you know, capable of putting food on our table, feeding our family, and just not wanting to jump off a freaking bridge every 5 seconds because we feel like our lives are listless and directionless. But I don't really know what that's going to look like. Um and to be honest, that is all contingent on whether or not we make it through the eye of that needle that I'm talking about with mass civil instability and so on and so forth likely on the horizon. So yeah, why am I making this video? Just cuz I wanted to talk to somebody about it, I suppose. And because uh I think I probably spent more time thinking about this than probably like 80 to 90% of my viewers. Although I would not sit here and claim to have spent more time thinking about it than all of you because some of you are extraordinarily intelligent, extraordinarily introspective people. I don't know what the future's going to look like, but I certainly know that it's going to be wildly different from today. Okay. So, yeah, looking forward to seeing what those job loss stats are in the next few months, but I imagine it's going to be more of what we're seeing