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

There's a narrative right now that says AI is going to destroy jobs. Do you think AI is going to destroy jobs? Or maybe you can take the other side. Do you think AI will create a labor shortage?

I think AI is going to create a labor shortage on the high-end white-collar jobs. I think AI will create— will reduce jobs on blue-collar, Like flipping a burger.

So check this out. So remember Groq, 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—

TPUs, right? They did TPUs.

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 Groq, offers a contrarian view. AI won't destroy jobs. It will create a labor shortage. He outlines 3 things that will happen because of AI. Number 1, deflationary pressure, meaning that 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 'cause you got robots 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 1. Number 2, 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. They're going to retire earlier because they're going to be able to support their lifestyle working less. Number 3, 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 were able to reduce that to 2%, we found things for those, the other 98% of the population to do. So, the jobs that are going to exist 100 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 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, I think those will be automated just like how agriculture doesn't need as many people because machinery really changed how we do agriculture and technology, right? It's made it so much more efficient. I think the same thing's 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 I think people get to work on what they want to work on.

That's what I think is going to happen more or less, because if the base level money is taken care of and there's a lot of abundance—

But wait, how's the base level money going to be taken care of?

Because if you have robots doing everything for you, 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, universal. I don't know about universal high income. 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. We already can't afford, you know, our current deficit.

I don't think we can afford more. $38 trillion, right? Or $40 trillion now?

Whatever the number is. And then supposedly he offered 7— he's going to offer $700 billion for Greenland plus $100,000 for every citizen.

That's a good deal for them.

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

Yeah, they own Greenland, I guess. Yeah.

The Google search that I did showed that they only had a debt load of $100 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. 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.

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 5, 10 years or so, I think there's going to be a lot of job displacement. I think there's going to be chaos. And I think, I don't want this to happen. I think there's going to be social unrest. And my prediction, last year was the rise of socialism is going to continue. We don't need to go down that path, but I think we're going to see that happen. I think long-term, if we can get over this hump, I think most people, the vast majority of people are going to be okay. 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 10 years old, 15 years old, we didn'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.

Yes.

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

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

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

I don't see software companies dying anytime soon.

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 3 to 4 engineers can recreate most of these products in less than 3 months. debate this. So you look at all these tickers over here. I think Team, Intuit down here is down 14%, and then Adobe's down 10%, Workday's down 8%. These are all SaaS companies over here.

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

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

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

HubSpot.

Okay.

You use Salesforce.

And HubSpot, we use both.

Oh yeah, that's right, yeah.

So it depends for what, I don't know why we have 2, but we have 2. Let's use HubSpot as an example. Do you agree that you can have a team of engineers who can recreate a HubSpot?

Just the base level?

Yeah, base level.

Base level, yes.

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 got to maintain that product and you use AI, it's coded stuff up for you. Is it always perfect or sometimes does it break?

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

Uh-huh. Because it breaks. It's not perfect. There's issues. The cost of HubSpot is much cheaper than you having to maintain it. 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.

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

Even a startup.

Yeah.

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 almost daily.

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 Cloud 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 rely on 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. 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.

That's the big one. It's distraction. It's the, the, it's just because you have this power now doesn't mean you should just try to build everything under the sun. Just because I like to talk about cloud code doesn't mean you should just build everything because that distracts you from your main thing, which slows down your— it actually slows down your growth. It's, that's why one of my friends had said this cloud code thing is very dangerous because it, especially for entrepreneurs, because entrepreneurs have what? We have ADD, right?

Yes.

It's known as the entrepreneurial ADD. And so this one's interesting. So this is continuing on what we were just talking about. So what I'm showing Neil right now is the 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 think it's all software companies. I think it's just tech companies, right? It's probably the biggest 100 companies in NASDAQ. 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. Yeah.

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.

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 software. Like we relaunched ClickFlow last week, our SEO product. I'm like, what's all the go-to-market stuff we can build and 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 in with the clock going, hey, what can we do to kind of fix the funnel over here? It's just telling us what to do, right?

Yeah.

I think that's what you should be focused on. And so never has it been more important to focus because even like I was talking to my some people today on my team and it's like, 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. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. Because we're talking about the deaths of software companies, Neil, I think we might as well talk about the cancer that is in America right now. You want to know what the cancer is?

I'm curious. Is it cancer itself or is there something else that I'm missing here? No, no.

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

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

Yeah, I guess it's a level of fraud, huh? It's like the Somalia fraud, but bigger than that. The Somalian fraud. And we have nothing, by the way, when we say Somalian, it's the Minnesota fraud. That's what we're talking about. Nothing against Somalian 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 they're supposed to build out stuff. When you interact with the state benefit systems, there's a decent chance Deloitte built it. In building the 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 that cost the state $32 billion, built by Deloitte. Tennessee kicking 250,000 children off Medicaid, built by Deloitte. The billion-dollar software for a project in California that got canceled after spending the budget. Ding, ding, ding. Deloitte. I didn't know this.

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.

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!

Well, this bad press for Deloitte today.

Yeah.

Hey, I see it on Twitter. 29.6 million views. Mm-hmm. It's been roughly 24 hours since it came out. It's been 24, 25 hours. Yeah. Almost exactly.

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. Pence won in 2016, Pence brought Verma to Washington as the CMS administrator controlling federal Medicaid funds. CMS pays 90% of the cost when states build new Medicaid IT systems. Verma hired Mary Mayhew, who lasted 3 months at CMS. Basically, Mayhew oversaw $135 million Medicaid contract to Deloitte, the same company that built Florida's unemployment system that was so broken it collapsed when COVID hit. So my point of saying all this is, one, Good job to these people uncovering fraud. 2, sometimes it's just who you know. It's not even what you do to get these deals. Yeah.

A lot of it is who you know.

Yeah.

And that's business.

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

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.

No, and that's why you got to, 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. You know how you have to know how to hire great people. All of these skills kind of come into one. But I think the level of fraud that we're seeing across the board from, you know, Nick Shirley, his exposé, 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 yeah, no, it's all our money.

Yep.

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

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 posting your blog posts to X articles?

I haven't.

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 the guy I used to work for, Treehouse, right? He wrote something, I think it got like, I don't know, 5 or 6 million views or something like that. And the post that you just saw, 30 million views on it. So the algorithm is giving—

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

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

I don't see it on mine.

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

I pay for X.

No, you don't.

Yes, I do, on a monthly basis.

Show me, on the left side, click X Premium.

I pay for X.

Yeah, it should be there. 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 how you write the article. It's like writing a blog post.

But look, I pay for X. You see it? I have articles here.

I can write articles. Yeah, you can write articles.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but I pay for X. So 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 at this guy over here. This post, it's like how to fix your life in a day, 168 million views.

Huh.

Yeah, see, you're going to start doing it now.

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

Just saved your life, Neil.

Yeah, X articles tests.

And it makes sense 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's a lot of good stuff there and I find myself sharing it quite a bit. So, and they're giving a million-dollar prize over the next 2 weeks for whoever gets the most reach, I think.

Oh, really? That ain't going to be me.

Yeah. No.

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

If I write about politics, maybe, but no, I'm not going to 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 he's talking about addiction, being tired, having more energy. And so his name is Yang 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 2,300 members, $50 a month, $115,000 a month, and that's just one offer. 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.

So how does he make the $100 grand a month?

It funnels everything to these courses and these memberships.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. So he gets the reach and said probably at the very end of it, it's like, hey, comment this to get this. And they probably throw them into ManyChat or some type of WAP thing. But I think that's interesting. And I think we're going to see a lot more of it.

Yep.

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

Yeah.

And we'll catch you next time.