AI Won't Destroy Jobs, It Will Create A Labor Shortage

Is AI going to destroy jobs or create a labor shortage? In this episode, hosts Neil and Eric debate how artificial intelligence impacts white collar and blue collar work, deflation, automation, and new industries. They break down why AI may reduce manual jobs while increasing demand for high skill roles, why SaaS companies are not dead, and how focus beats building everything yourself. The conversation also covers government IT failures, fraud, X Articles reach, and viral AI influencers monetizing at scale. Key takeaways: • AI may create labor shortages, not mass unemployment • Automation shifts work toward higher value skills • Focus beats rebuilding software with AI Chapters: (00:00) AI jobs debate (01:54) Deflation and labor shortage (05:01) New work and meaning (07:45) Is SaaS dead? (10:20) Government IT failures (14:30) X Articles growth (16:26) AI monk monetization

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:44Speaker 00

  I think AI is going to create a labor shortage on the high end. White-collar jobs. I think AI will create, uh, uh, will reduce jobs on blue collar, like flipping a burger. So check this out. So remember Grok, the one with the Q? The one that sold for 20 billion to Nvidia? Okay, yeah. Yeah, yeah, okay. The chip company. Yeah, the chip company. So Jonathan Ross.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  TPUs, right? They did TPUs or something?

• 1:12Speaker 00

  I don't know if they did TPUs. It's some type of chip. It's an AI chip company. I don't know about TPUs. I don't think they did TPUs, but Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of AI chip company Grok, offers a contrarian view. AI won't destroy jobs. It will create a labor shortage. He outlines three things that will happen because of AI. Number one, deflationary pressure, meaning that this, this water bottle over here, your water bottle over there is going to cost less. Your housing is going to cost less. Everything is going to cost less because you've got robots, you know, farming coffee more efficiently, building things more efficiently, building your homes and all that, right? So people are going to need less money. That's number one. Number two, people will opt out of the economy. This one's interesting to me. People are going to work fewer hours. They're going to work fewer days a week, and they're going to work fewer years.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  They're going to retire earlier because they're going to be able to support their lifestyle working less. Number three, entirely new jobs and industries will emerge. Jonathan points to history as evidence. If you look at 100 years ago, 98% of the workforce in the United States was in agriculture. When we're able to reduce that to 2%. That we found things for those the other ninety eight percent of the population to do. So those jobs, the jobs that are going to exist one hundred years from now, we can't even contemplate. So software developers didn't exist a century ago, influencers didn't exist a century ago. So his conclusion is deflationary pressure, workforce opt outs and new industries. We can't yet imagine will can combine to create one outcome. We're not going to have enough people. So I think him and I are saying the same thing because I believe you're going to have all this new demand for jobs. But jobs like flipping a burger or putting fries in oil.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  I think those will be automated, just like how agriculture doesn't need as many people. Cause machinery really change how we do agriculture and technology, right? It's made it so much more efficient. I think the same thing is going to happen with, do you really need someone to sit there and mow a lawn? Or can a lawnmower just use a laser, detect everything and mow it itself? And then that person who used to mow lawns will have to go find a new skill. I think people get to work on what they want to work on. That's what I think is going to happen more, more or less. Because if the base level of money is taken care of and there's a lot of abundance. But wait, how's the base level of money going to be taken care of? Because if you have robots doing everything for you, they're, they're creating all the abundance. And we're talking about not even just universal basic income, but more of universal people are, you know, universe.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  I don't know about universal high, yeah, universal high income, not universal wealth. I would say universal high income because we have like, look at the robots right now doing the work for us, like the Waymos and all that. We're going to, the costs are going to come down to such a low level where everyone's going to be at a pretty prosperous level. I don't know if I. That's what I believe. Yeah, well, my, there's going to be a percentage of the population, and I know you agree with this. That is that Uber driver that doesn't learn a new skill and then they're screwed. And then they can't figure out how to make money or pay their bills. I don't see a world where the government just steps in and gives everyone money, at least in the United States.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  We already can't afford, you know, our current deficit. I don't think we can afford more than-

• 4:07Speaker 00

  Thirty-eight trillion, right? Or forty trillion now?

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Whatever the number is, and then supposedly he offered seven, he's going to offer seven hundred billion dollars for Greenland, plus a hundred thousand dollars for every citizen.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  That's a good deal for them.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  So, uh, that I don't know, because I don't know what Greenland has in minerals and stuff like that. But I did look up the deficit that Denmark has, because I believe Denmark is the one who's-

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, they own Greenland, I guess, yeah.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  The Google search that I did showed that they only had a debt load of a hundred and something billion. So I'm like, eh, they would have no debt. I'm not saying they should do a deal or not. That's not for me to decide.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Um, and I think the people in Greenland need to figure out what they want in life, and people should take their perspective, but that's separate.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  I'll give you my thoughts on this. I think in the short term, to your point, that Uber driver, in the short term, I think in the next like five, ten years or so, I think there's gonna be a lot of job displacement. I think there's gonna be chaos. And I think, I don't want this to happen. I think there's gonna be social unrest. And my prediction last year was the rise of socialism is gonna continue. We don't need to go down that path, but I think we're gonna see that happen. I think long term, if we can get over this hump, I think most people, the vast majority of people are gonna be okay. And when you're, and then I think the vast majority of people, because you and I have kind of realized this, right? Like, we've done reasonably well in our lives. Once you've done reasonably well, you realize that everything we wanted, maybe the beach, when we're in like maybe ten years old, fifteen years old, we don't want to do anything. That was always the wrong way of looking at it, the fallacy. We always wanted to find something that was interesting to work on and to continue to work on.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  So I think AI is gonna enable people to eventually realize that, and then work on the things that they want to work on, that also provide value to society.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally agree. You have another interesting topic here, the death of software companies. I'm curious what this is because-

• 5:47Speaker 00

  Oh, check this out. You'll like this.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  I don't see software companies dying anytime soon.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, check this out. So this guy Bubble Boy tweets this out, "SaaS is cooked. AI reduces the amount of any BS SaaS. A team of three to four engineers can recreate most of these products in less than three months." We can debate this. Um, so you look at all these tickers over here. I think team, um, Intuit down here is down, uh, fourteen percent, um- And then Adobe's down 10%, Workday's down 8%. These are all SaaS companies over here.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, HubSpot's down. I don't think they're in here, but HubSpot's down quite a bit.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  So this guy's like software, right? So we can like, I don't think SaaS is cooked, but I don't, I don't think you can just say, I'm gonna, you can surely clone any of these things and that's pretty easy, but managing it is very difficult.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and let's go, let's, let's use the example of both our businesses. What do you use for your CRM?

• 6:34Speaker 00

  HubSpot.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  You use Salesforce.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  And HubSpot, we use both.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  So it depends for what? I don't know why we have two, but we have two. Let's, let's use HubSpot as an example. Do you agree that you can have a team of engineers who can recreate a HubSpot?

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Just the base level?

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, base level.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  Base level, yes.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  For the stuff you need, that you use. Not the other bells and whistles, but the base features that you use, pretty easily. Okay? Then you gotta maintain that product. And you use AI, it's coded stuff up for you? Is it always perfect or sometimes does it break?

• 7:09Speaker 00

  No, it's, it, it makes me realize that it's really annoying to maintain this stuff.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Uh huh, because it breaks. It's not perfect. There's issues.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  The cost of HubSpot is much cheaper than you-

• 7:21Speaker 00

  Than you having to maintain it.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Maintain it, build it, and make sure it doesn't break. Because if it breaks, and then you end up not realizing how many leads you lost, or it happens too late, you're screwed.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  And if you're a multi-billion, multi-trillion dollar company, you can't afford to, for it to break.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Even a startup.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Every single day is potential deals and leads, right? I don't understand, and I see this on the public markets, like I watch CNBC.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Almost-

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Your favorite channel? Almost daily, yeah, it is my favorite channel, other than on Sundays when I watch football. And on CNBC, you see someone like the host talking about these software stocks and how they've been going down. They're like, "Yeah, I can use Cursor and Claude Code, and I can just build my own HubSpot, and I don't even need them." And I was just like, "Okay." And I'm not trying to be offensive, but go run a business and go try to build your own HubSpot and run it. When you're creating a business, you don't have enough time in the day, resources or money. So why would you waste your time building a HubSpot when you can- Use the version HubSpot has a free version and then it scales up with you and it's really affordable.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  It's the dumbest thing for marketers to go build products like that instead of just paying for the ones that are out there. It's like you're recreating the wheel instead of focusing on your main core business.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  That's the big one. It's distraction. It's the, it's just because you have this power now, it doesn't mean you should just try to build everything under the sun. Just because I like to talk about Claude Code, doesn't mean you should just build everything. Because that distracts you from your main thing, which slows down, it actually slows down your growth. That's why one of my friends had said this Claude Code thing is very dangerous because especially for entrepreneurs, because entrepreneurs have what? We have ADD, right? It's known as the entrepreneurial ADD. And so this one's interesting. So this is continuing on what we're just talking about. So what I'm showing Neil right now is a NASDAQ 100 and Morgan Stanley Software Index have diverged widely. So Morgan Stanley SaaS Index, I don't know what's in it, but it's gone down quite a bit versus the NASDAQ 100. Which I don't, I don't think it's all software companies. I think it's just tech companies, right?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  It's probably the biggest hundred companies in NASDAQ.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think we are going to see maybe a retracing of SaaS companies from like a public market standpoint. But we're not talking about it from that standpoint. We're talking about it from a business standpoint.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and I don't know what's going to happen with these stock prices, but I wouldn't bet against HubSpot as a company. What happens with the stock price is a different thing. I can't control that. But every marketer out there recreating their own HubSpot and building it on their own, it's stupid. It's a waste of time.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  You know, I mean, we should talk about that for a moment. Like what should marketers do with the superpower? I think you should be making lead magnets. I think you should figure out how to splinter off, you know, elements of your, your, your software. Like we relaunched Click Flow last week, our, our SEO product. I'm like, what are, what's all the go to market stuff we can build in? How do we build in the managed services component? We're looking at the funnel every day and we're just, we're also just plugging with the Claude Code. Hey, what, what can we do to kind of fix the funnel over here? It's just telling us what to do, right? I think that's what you should be focused on. And so never has it been more important to focus. Cause even like I was talking to my, my, some people today on my team and say, oh, this person's really good at AI creative. We should have them figure out how to, you know, do this and do this and do this. I'm like, that's actually not what we hired him for. And so I think if you're a leader listening to this right now. You have to double down on this.

• 10:31Speaker 00

  Because we're talking about the debts of software companies, Neil, I think we might as well talk about the cancer that is in America right now. Do you want to know what the cancer is?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  I'm curious. Is it cancer itself or is there something else I'm missing here?

• 10:42Speaker 00

  So it's a $74 billion cancer that's metastasized across America. It's known as Deloitte.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, they got a lot of government contracts and then we never launched any of those things that they got paid for.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  I guess it's a level of fraud, huh? It's like the Somalia fraud, but bigger than that. The Somali and fraud. And we have that. By the way, when we say Somali, it's the Minnesota fraud. That's what we're talking about. Nothing against Somali people. So this guy Beaver tweets this. So you were never meant to hear the name Deloitte and you were never meant to know the government has wasted $74 billion by working with them. Quietly, Deloitte is one of the largest contractors quote unquote building American government IT systems. Medicaid enrollment, unemployment insurance, child welfare case management, food assistance eligibility. Wait, this sounds like all the fraud that's happening in Minnesota right now, all this stuff. And actually, all around the US right now. So this was built on the stuff. When you interact with the state benefit systems, there's a decent chance Deloitte built it.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  In building the 600 M row, 600 million row and growing database for Somalia Scan. Oh, this is the guy that built Somalia Scan, which tracks the fraud that's happening in Minnesota. I sorted through literally millions of invoices and one name continued to appear. Deloitte. California's unemployment fraud disaster cost the state $32 billion built by Deloitte. Tennessee kicking 250,000 children off Medicaid built by Deloitte. The billion dollar software project in California that got canceled after spending the budget. Ding ding ding, Deloitte. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson shows how modern brands grow by removing the friction in their marketing and customer experience

• 12:18Speaker 00

  that pushes customers away every single day, often without leaders even realizing it. Each episode delivers practical insights, real brand examples and conversations with marketing leaders, showing brands how to win with the new rules of growth, identity-driven marketing, cultural relevance, and frictionless customer experiences. Listen to Frictionless Growth Marketing wherever you get your podcasts. I didn't know this.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  I didn't know this either. So Deloitte is getting paid a lot of money and not building what they're supposed to be, or they're not building at all, or a combination of both?

• 12:49Speaker 00

  I think it's a terrible job, or they haven't fulfilled on it. And so in every state, they've provided services, 25 states. They had significant system failures, wrongful benefit denials affecting hundreds of thousands, fraud vulnerabilities that cost the taxpayer billions, projects that ran 5X over budget before getting canceled. And they kept getting hired by the government. Wow.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Well, this bad press for Deloitte today.

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Hey, I see it on Twitter. 29.6 million views. It's been roughly 24 hours since they came out. It's been 24, 25 hours.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Almost exactly.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  Here, I'll give you an example here, and we can, we can react to this one. Okay, check this out. So Seema Verma ran a consulting company called SVC Inc. in Indiana. Government Pence, I think it's Mike Pence, paid her $6.6 million to help design Indiana's Medicaid expansion. When Trump, Pence won in 2016, Pence brought Verma to Washington as the CMS administrator controlling federal Medicaid funds. CMS. CMS pays 90% of the cost when states build new Medicaid IT systems. Verma hired Mary Mayhew, who lasted three months at CMS. Basically, Mayhew oversaw $135 million Medicaid contracted Deloitte. The same company that built Florida's unemployment system that was so broken it collapsed on COVID hit. So my point of saying all this is, one,

• 14:07Speaker 00

  good job to these people uncovering fraud. Two,

• 14:11Speaker 00

  sometimes it's just who you know. It's not even what you do.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  To get these deals?

• 14:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  A lot of it is who you know.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  And that's business.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  But ideally, if you want to be sustainable, it's also what you do.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Ideally, the person who wins at the end of the day has the best product or service. But sadly, we both know it doesn't always work that way.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  No, and that's why you gotta, you kind of, you, as a leader, you have to have range. You have to know who to talk to. You have to know how to build relationships. You have to know how to keep these relationships. You have to know how to build a great product, great product. You know, you have to know how to hire great people. All of these skills kind of come into one. But I think the, the level of fraud that we're seeing across the board, from, you know, Nick Sherrill, his expose, and he keeps exposing more and more. I just hope we solve this. As an American, to have, what, I think $700 billion of fraud a year is nuts. And that's your tax dollars going into this stuff. So.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's, it's all our money.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  But yeah, well, this is stuff that the government will figure out, but that's terrible press for Deloitte.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  You know what we should talk about too? The article that I just, that we just talked about right now, this Deloitte piece. X articles are crushing it. So have you started post your, posting your blog post to X articles?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  I haven't.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  They're getting a lot of reach and so like a lot of random people that I like haven't seen in a while. It's like, um, the guy I used to work for, um, uh, Treehouse, right? He wrote something, I think it got like, I don't know, five or six million views or something like that. And the, the post that you just saw, 30 million views on it. So the algorithm is giving.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  When you're saying X articles, you're talking about long X posts.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, not X, no, there's a, there's a button called articles.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  I don't see it on mine.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, cause you don't pay for it, you cheap ass.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  I, I pay for X.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  No you don't.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Yes, I do on a monthly basis.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Show me, on the, on the left side, click, um, X premium.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  I pay for X.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, it should be the, if you click on premium, the X, is there a premium button? If there's a premium button, there's an articles button and that's where you write the article. It's like a, it's like writing a blog post.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  But look, I pay for X.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  You see it?

• 16:14Speaker 01

  I have articles here, I can write an article.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  You can write articles, yeah, yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I pay for X.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  So my, my, yeah, you could, if you pay for X, you can do it. So my point is like, this is just like a long form article and that's all you're doing. And like, look, look at this guy over here. This post, it's like how to fix your life in a day, 168 million views.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, see, you're gonna start doing it now.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I am. I'm gonna write myself a note to release some of my content on those articles.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  See, just saved your life, Neil.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, X articles, tests.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  And it, it makes sense as, as we're talking about this right now. They're trying to make the algorithm more helpful and people are lacking long form content. And I've read a lot of long form content on X, there, there's a lot of good stuff there. I, I find myself sharing it quite a bit, so. And they're, they're giving a million dollar prize over the next two weeks for whoever gets the most reach, I think.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Oh, really? That ain't gonna be me.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, no.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  You could potentially win it because you'll write about politics.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  If I write about politics, maybe, but no, I'm not gonna do that. So, anyway, can we also talk about the AI monk that makes $100,000 a month? So, have you seen this guy on Instagram, this monk over here? There's always like a temple and all that, right? So, he's got 2.5 million followers and he's making $100,000 a month, this monk, or whoever's managing this monk, right? So, you know, he's like, you know, talking about like addiction, you know, being tired, having more energy. And so, his name is Ying Mun, an AI monk that doesn't exist. He's funneling his traffic to various offers. His main one being a 30-day healing journey, okay? So, 2.3, so 2,300 members, $50 a month, $115,000 a month. And that's just one offer.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  So, look at all the offers here. He's got a 30-day healing journey. He's got these ebook bundles and things like that. And it's just like AI versions of him, right? And millions of views per video, all funneling to WAP, which is that service. I'm still not clear on what they do right now. Some seasons feel heavy, Neil. Time moves slowly at night and the mind begins to, I don't know.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  So, how does it make the 100 grand a month?

• 18:16Speaker 00

  It funnels everything to these courses and these memberships. Yeah, so he gets the reach and says, probably at the very end of it's like, hey, comment this to get this. And they probably throw them into many chat or some type of WAP thing.

• 18:29Speaker 00

  But I think that's interesting and I think we're gonna see a lot more of it.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Whether it's monks, maybe it's a hot monk, maybe Noah, you wanna make like a bikini, you know, something, I don't know. Yeah.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  And we'll catch you next time.