Joe DownsCEO & Co-Founder, Belrose Storage Group. Founder, Storage Moguls.

Taming Anxiety Surrounding Job Loss

14 Jul 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:06

In this monologue, the speaker shares personal anxiety about the rapid advancement of AI and its potential to displace workers. He recounts attending a Founders Forum event in Los Angeles where a Google representative warned that within 18 months many jobs could be lost. The conversation sparked a debate among founders about the realism of that timeline. The speaker then explores the practical implications for his own company: how AI will affect performance, customer outcomes, and the need to integrate AI tools without causing panic among employees. He wrestles with the challenge of preparing staff to learn and build AI solutions while reassuring them that the technology will augment rather than eliminate their roles, and he outlines the early steps he is taking to address these concerns.

Chapters

I was having a lot of AI anxiety, like I think a lot of people get. And it was like, what's gonna happen? Like I was at a, I'm part of this Founders Forum club. So I was at an event in Los Angeles with a ton of founders of various companies of various sizes. And they were talking about AI and there was a guy there from Google and somebody else who had more credentials than I know. And he was saying, he's like, you have 18 months and we're all out of work. And I was like, is this real? And the guy next to me goes, that's, that's not gonna happen. But nobody knew then, right? Is that real or not real? Right. Yeah, but it's still, it was scary. And then it was like, okay, how is this going to affect, what are people going to expect me to have figured out by now? How's this going to affect our performance? How's this going to affect our, how do we use this to help our customers? How do we help this to push forward the business? How do we not, how do I not have all of my employees freak out that they're losing their jobs because that's all they're seeing online and help them feel comfortable in adapting this and feel like this is going to help them and not harm them because nobody's going to work themselves out of a job. But I need them to learn it and build it, right? So that was like the spring of figuring out like,