Why AI Won't Kill Jobs

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So the AI job apocalypse narrative is just completely wrong. And this actually comes from Andreessen Horowitz over here. So let me just show you this, Neil.

So we like charts, right? So check this out. So narrative violations abound. Demand for software engineers is actually rising. Okay, that's number one.

Number two, software devs are rising as a share of new jobs. That's number two. Number three is AI exposed industries are seeing above trend wage growth and then open PM jobs, so product manager jobs, haven't been higher since 2022. Okay, check this out.

So demand for software engineers is rising. So you look at this from 2025. This is like, I don't know, June 2025 inflection in software hiring. So it was going down indeed job postings for software engineers.

And then all of a sudden, boom, it shoots up this dark blue one over here. But overall, indeed, job postings are still trending downwards. So what does that tell you, Neil? Let's start with this one first.

Shows that people need more engineers because they want to keep using Claude and all these other solutions to make their companies more efficient, better, and grow faster. Yep. So my take on this is if you have AI-pilled engineers, they're doing more ultimately. Everyone's talking about this concept of token maxing, which we'll get to in a second.

Um, but the reality is now your, your engineers are truly, people used to talk about 10 X engineers. Now we're talking about a hundred X engineers. We're talking about a thousand X engineers. You can just do a lot more with one individual who's powered by itself.

Here's a caveat though, Neil. Um, so we have some engineers in, in Eastern Europe and, um, I was talking to him recently, one of them, I was like, Hey,

do you know other engineers that are like you that are super AI-pilled? Because we'd like to have more people like you. We need more engineers, right? And he's like, oh, no, no, no.

You wouldn't want people like us. I'm like, why? He's like, no, no, no. I'm like, what do you mean no? He's like, because they believe that you should still write code by hand.

I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. We can't have that. So, yes, demand for software engineering is rising if they're AI-pilled. Yes. And it's not just even software jobs.

We're seeing, at least on our end, we haven't seen for most roles, at least in marketing, where AI has been causing more layoffs. We've been actually seeing the usage of AI increase in marketing. So, for example, I was giving a lecture yesterday. A lecture?

A speech. It was at a university, though. That's why I was saying lecture. To around 300 people. That was yesterday. And during that lecture, the majority of the people were, and this was in Spain, but the majority of the people in there worked for global brands, right?

So they were just, you know, think of a big, large corporation that's publicly traded. They were working in their Spain office. And I was asking how many of them in the room use Claude.

More than half. It was roughly 60% that said that they use Claude. And when I asked them how many of your marketing departments have gone smaller, no one really raised their hand.

I think there was maybe one or two, but it was a small amount. And it was for more reasons related to business performance than actual, more business performance than actual like because of AI. And then when I dove into it even more with them and I asked, what has AI done to your marketing? You want to know what the number one thing everyone said that it's caused with humans and workers?

What? It's caused them to have to work more. So they've all found that AI has not reduced headcount. It did not reduce the amount of hours they're working.

It's actually causing more work. Not that, yes, it is making them more efficient in marketing and in other roles, but it's also causing them to have to do new tasks and new work, and that's adding up.

Yep. So one thing that we'll come to as well, I was just looking at, you know, Coinbase cut, I think 14% of staff or something like that. And they're just trying to reimagine the organization, right? So the org chart, I think they want to have less and less layers.

But, you know, Brian Armstrong, the CEO and co-founder of Coinbase, introduced this concept known as the one person product team, right? Or the one person teams, because that one person now can do so much more. I I just look at a lot of things that I shipped on my own this week where I just didn't want to wait.

And that is happening now, right? So I think the demand for not just software engineers, to Neil's point, I think it's demand for AI-pilled talent is continuing to rise. And it's going to continue to rise because these people can do so much more. I think the key thing, which we'll talk about maybe later, is how you go about...

making sure that you create the conditions where they can continue to do good work and do more. But you don't want them to burn out. I've mentioned this on a couple of times the last few episodes. My number one concern right now from the AI people, AI pill people is that they might burn out.

So that's something that we're talking about. Now, software devs are a larger share of new jobs. So jobs created overall, software devs versus overall. So this is cited from Morgan Stanley Research, AlphaWise.

So software developer is in the blue over here. And then in the gold, you have percentage of US created jobs, which are software developers. So that's going up. I mean, it's still, you know, we see it rising from a low of maybe 1.5% to a high of, this looks like 2.5% or so.

And then, by the way, you see software developer jobs on the left side. So that's in the thousands. And so it's kind of, it went to a low of like, I don't know, this is like 22,000 to a high of 35,000 or so.

I guess this is like $37,000. Okay, next one over here. Above trend wage growth for system design and AI exposed industry. So computer systems design and related services, higher AI exposure.

So that's all moving up and to the right. You can see the dotted line over here. This is ChatGPT. I think this is interesting. Again, I think we're just going to see more and more abundance.

Technology has always created more. People are like, oh, Someone was leaving a stupid comment on my Instagram. I was like, well, this time it's different.

It's like, oh, you mean it's different than the agriculture? When we moved to the industrial age, when we moved away from agriculture, where it was like 98% of people were in agriculture and then it moved to 2%. Like, oh, we've never experienced a shift like this before. Like, what are you talking about, man?

Technology changes everything. And I'll just ask you a question, Neil. Would you rather be the king of the world 500 years ago or would you rather be who you are right now?

I'm going to go with I'd rather be who I am right now because when you said 500 years ago, I was thinking about it. I'm like, wait, they probably didn't even have toilets. Exactly. Exactly.

Let me break it down for you a little more, Neil, because somehow I was watching toilet paper. No, no, no. You don't get that. Let me tell you what you do get.

So, Neil, I did some research on this, right? If you live in a castle, let me tell you how it works, okay? If you live in a castle, when you take a poo-poo, okay, when you're, like, it goes all the way into a pit. It's like an outhouse, okay?

And then it smells and it comes all the way up, okay? Not only that, you have, everybody has, like, a bunch of diseases and things. You don't have air conditioner. No air conditioner, no toilet paper, no toilet, okay?

No cell phone, no internet, no nothing, okay? And you just sit on your throne all day. So you'd rather be the king of the world or who you are today. Exactly.

technology has made our lives better and that will never stop but if i had a bet i think most people would choose the king from 500 years ago you know why neil because most people you just need to think about it a little more that's all i'm saying no and and that when you answered it right away my first inclination like who wouldn't want to be a king and then i started thinking about it i'm like 500 years ago is a very different time you're missing out on too many things that makes life easier Like no microwave, you know, like think about food options. The variety of food we get right now, you wouldn't get all those varieties of food 500 years ago.

No DoorDash, no Uber Eats, right? No, no flight. Okay. No, nothing. No, no, but you're a king. Someone will get you all that stuff. But yes, you would have to go to places on a horse.

Right? It's just like there is no car or anything. That technology wasn't around. You weren't the benefactor of that technology because it didn't exist.

You know what I just thought about, Neil? You're going on a vacation soon, so you say there's bad internet. Why don't you bring a Starlink with you? I actually have one in my closet.

I have Starlink as well. I've thought about that. Okay. But you don't want to game it. That's good. Okay. Anyway. I don't want to game it because my kids want to spend time with me where I'm not working that much.

I can't take a whole week off or 10 days or however many days are booked. But, you know, I was talking to my wife and she's like, still work. Just try not to work for more than like three, four hours a day. And I'm like, oh, that's very reasonable.

That's so generous. That's good. That's three to four hours. When I was just traveling in Mexico last week, I was working three, four hours a day. It's great.

And then the girlfriend was like, oh, do you feel like you're bored or whatever? I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. You need to take more time. You take more time.

Okay. It's good. Anyway, I have this chart up and then we can move here. But before we go to the chart. did i ever tell you how much time my wife requires me to converse with her on a daily basis like give her like how much time no 30 minutes 10 minutes a day she's like look just try to interact with me for 10 minutes a day and she's like i'm happy with that she's like i know you're busy working but she doesn't expect much so i was like all right kids expect a lot more so i had to do quite a bit more with them my wife 10 minutes she's happy how long with the kids

There is no set time. When I'm in L.A., if you notice, I don't ever do dinners with anyone, very, very rarely. I try to do dinners with my kids, no phones at the dinner table.

I'm willing to sit there for 30, 40 minutes. My kids probably last 15, 20 minutes. Okay. Uh, and then I'd probably do like some puzzles or other things like that or whatever games they want.

I don't do that daily, but I try to whenever they want. Um, and it's more so me not doing it as much as they actually want. They would take it every day, but sometimes I'm busy.

And when I am in LA, I try to pick them up or take them to school, if not do both on a daily basis. So that gives me 30 to 40 minutes each way with them.

where there's nothing and we're just talking and see how their day goes usually if i ask them at the beginning they're going to give me random responses and and please excuse my language but i'm like oh who'd you play with today they'll be like poo poo pee pee ha ha ha ha right but then after like five minutes they'll really have start having deep conversations like my son the other day he has a bag that you that he takes to school to

And I was like, William, when you leave the car, it's your responsibility to take your bag. He's like, what do I do? I'm like, it's your responsibility. You need to learn to handle your possessions and take care of them and be responsible.

And he's like, no, it's your responsibility. He's like, I only have to carry the bag because you're forcing me to go to school. If you didn't force me to go to school, I would have to take the bag with me. So in theory, it is your responsibility.

He didn't use the word theory, but I was like, all right. Do you feel like he's smarter than you at your age? No, sorry. When you're the same age, do you think he's smarter than you?

He's four turning five. He knows the square roots of numbers in his head. And he can do multiplication of double-digit numbers. He can do a double versus single in his head.

He can't do double and double in his head. He can do division in his head from a double-digit to a single. But, yeah, for a lot of stuff, addition, subtraction is easy for him. Yeah, he is more gifted.

But I'll also give this caveat. I think a lot of people in this world, including you and I, have more potential than where we're at right now. The difference is, and this is a sad reality, I'm able to give my kids

some of the best education there is in the world. A lot of the people who apply to my kids' schools actually come from China and they had to put on the website, like you need to actually live here. And it's very competitive from applicants from China for the school. I'm in Los Angeles because one of the best academic schools for elementary in the whole world.

And because I'm able to provide those kinds of things for them and spend the money and get them private chess tutors and jujitsu tutors and baseball tutors and all this kind of stuff, like one-on-one, they're able to learn and consume information way more than I ever was, or even you are. And,

Some of it you could say is genetics, but I think a lot of it is the surroundings that you and I will be able to give the future generations. And I wish, you know, more of the world could experience that somehow. Right. But there's only so much you and I can do from donating and stuff like that because we don't have enough to figure out how to get the whole world onto that kind of stuff.

Yeah. So let's tie this into how this applies to people as well, right? And so I see AI as a big equalizer as well. So here's the thing, Neil, I would say at age four, the reason I asked that question is age four, your son, because the things you're talking about, I'm like for sure smarter than you at that age or smarter than me, right?

But because they were provided with the opportunity and also there's this amazing technology that will help equalize things, AI tutors and things like that as well, right? So I think things are going like, I know there's negative sentiment in America, but again, when you look at other countries, when they think about this stuff, very positive sentiment. So let me just pull up this, this other chart over here and we can move on.

So if you look at the open roles of product managers since 2022, look in 2023, it was 4,000. It was like, Oh my God, like, like it went from 10,000, Dropped all the way to 4,000 in this time period. It was like, oh, we're not going to need product managers anymore, right?

So it drops down. And then what's happening is it's continued to rise from the low. It's risen 79%. Okay, this is from Lenny's newsletter. And I think this is really important because, Neil, I think...

really AI-pilled product managers, we're actually looking for them right now. One actually reached out to me yesterday. He worked at Uber before. I think he worked at another one of these Silicon Valley startups and he's been like a head of growth.

But if you're good at product, you have taste and you're super AI-pilled the way I see it right now, is you're able to combine a lot of the elements around design, development, and product. And so I think those people are able to do a lot more with less, right? And so that's why this is going up.

So again, a lot of narrative violations over here. And then Andreessen Horowitz wrote the whole AI job apocalypse is a complete fantasy. I think we're going to see some turnover in some areas, but especially in a lot of AI-enabled industries, I don't think we're going to see that happen. So let's move on.

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Back to the show. Yeah, and we have some charts coming out in a few weeks. We did a survey and a study. And what we're finding is, in marketing departments at least,

The adoption, and when I say of AI, I'm not talking about people just using chat GPT. I'm talking about them using like Cloud Cowork, Cloud Code, et cetera, in marketing has drastically increased.

And what we're also seeing is not only are organizations consuming AI, at least in marketing, they're not really firing people. And they're actually spending more money and marketing as an organization in total because A, people are getting more done and they're paying for a lot of AI tokens. And I believe what we're going to actually see is not AI causing a big cut in human capital, at least in marketing, but it's actually going to cause a big increase in spend due to the fact that we have to pay for all these tokens.

Dude. Okay, so let's go to token maxing in a second. So let's hold that thread for a moment. But because you just mentioned the people thing, I'm going to take the other side of this one for this topic over here.

Okay, I'm going to take the other side. So let's talk about the economics of GameStop, $11.5 billion company, buying eBay, $48 billion company. Because you saw this on CNBC and Neil, because I know you watch CNBC. Maybe you were traveling, so maybe you didn't see it, but...

The CNBC anchors were like, Hey, so how do you, how do you make the math work? Like you're $11 billion company. And then it was like a really awkward, like five minute interaction where it's like, look at the website, look at the website, just look at the website. Right.

He's like, you know, it's going to be half debt, um, half cash. And that's what we're going to do. Did you see that interaction? Uh-huh. But it's not going to end up happening because GameStop, they can't afford to buy them.

And eBay is not going to want to take a lot of GameStop shares. Okay. So here's what I'll say. GameStop CEO says eBay needs way fewer people. So I saw this interaction over here.

I'm going to share my screen. Okay. So hopefully you can let me know if you can hear the audio as well, Neil. So here we go. This is from TVPN. All right.

You see this? Yeah. Okay, so this is Ryan Cohen from the CEO of GameStop, and then these are the two hosts over here. The reality is most of that marketing spend isn't making money, but everyone's trying to protect their jobs, and there's kickbacks.

There's all kinds of perverse incentives, and so I'm running the business like a family business. It's really not that complicated, and you look at eBay spending $2.5 billion to grow 1 million users, and

$2 billion in cost cuts between sales and marketing and corporate overhead, it's not a lot. And it's not something that's going to take a few years. It's something that is going to happen fast, fast, fast because I'm putting leverage on this thing and I don't want to run a leverage business. So I'm not going to run it hot.

I'm going to pay down the leverage and I'm going to increase earnings. They're spending $5.5 billion on operating expenses on an $11 billion business that

has no inventory and has asset lights. So it just, there's 11 and a half thousand employees and it doesn't make sense. It doesn't, you don't need, I can run that business. I can run that business from my house.

Like it's, it's eBay. It looks the same as it did in 1995. Yeah. What he's saying is true. And it's not just eBay. Most large organizations are bloated.

And they don't need as many people. They don't need to spend as much. And even if you look at like Coinbase, yes, Coinbase laid off a lot of people, but crypto is not booming globally. as it once was like a year, year and a half ago, or whatever that timeframe was, right?

When like Solana was in the 200s and Bitcoin was at all-time highs. So Coinbase is probably not doing as well financially. And I'm just making this assumption. I haven't seen their earnings, but based on their stock price, I'm pretty sure I'm correct on that one.

So when you look at it, a lot of these companies don't need as many people. It's just like Block and Jack Dorsey. Oh, we're laying off 40% because they know your company hasn't been growing. So you're spending all this money for people to grow the business, but they're not growing it.

The staff you need to maintain the business is a much smaller portion of people. eBay's spending a ton of money to grow, and he even said the numbers, $2.5 billion to only add a million more users. That's not worth it. You're better off just saving the money, not growing as much, and whatever your growth rate is, it is, but make it much more of a cash cow.

And I'm guessing that's what his plans are. Does that mean he can run that out of his home? No. Do I think that he believes he can run that out of his home?

No. But he's just trying to make a point. And yes, it is an exaggeration. But you can probably run that business with a few thousand employees. Worst case scenario, I think you can cut half.

And I haven't dived into the numbers, but that would just be my rough guess. Best case scenario, you can probably get down to 1,000, 2,000 employees max.

Here's what I'll say about eBay. So I think when you become larger and larger, a lot of bureaucracy comes and starts to become inefficient. This is, again, we go back to the previous chart. You're still going to need the super AI pilled people.

You want those people on your team. I think some of the examples you gave me, there's a lot of people, they take forever to respond. There's a lot of assistance. There's an assistant's assistance.

And then they're flying around in jets. They're on vacation all the time and all this stuff. That tends to happen when you add more and more layers. You get further away from the truth.

And so... I think his thesis is strong. I don't know if he's going to be able to pick up, if he's able to pick up eBay, amazing. Yesterday, what's funny, Neil, is he was actually, he was on X, he's like, he just started buying stuff on eBay and selling stuff and then they banned him.

He shared it to Twitter that he got banned, right? So I think he's great at driving attention for this. I think there's something to be learned. I think there's a great business lesson from this as well.

I don't know if he's going to get it, similar to you, Neil, but I think his thesis is strong and somebody should try to pick it up and do what he's talking about. And I think what's going to happen is, you know, those other people that unfortunately get cut, I think they're eventually going to reskill themselves, hopefully, and then find something else to do. And I think there's going to be, you know, more balance there. But I think first and foremost, when you run a business, it's about taking care of the business first and foremost.

It's not about having an assistant and an assistant's assistant and having all these private jets and taking all these vacations and things like that. That gets away from the main point of the business.

Yeah, but the point he made about marketing, I think is something that I hope sinks in for a lot of you guys who are listening right now. You shouldn't spend to grow at all costs. That is a very terrible model. Yes, you can spend on things like branding if you genuinely believe they're going to have a payback, they're going to pay dividends in the future.

And if it's a long payback period, that's okay. But spending foolishly year after year after year, especially in an older company like eBay, spending 2.5 on sales and marketing, billion, 2.5 billion a year on sales and marketing, and adding a million new users based on the data that he's sharing... That's crazy. That doesn't make sense.

But that being said, yeah, we'll talk to you guys later. Bye.