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All right, one of the smartest, most forward-thinking hackers that is focused on AI and cybersecurity wrote this post this week, and we're going to talk about it. It's a long one. Hold 2X if you got it. He said he's worried it might get really bad, and he thinks it's coming sooner rather than later. Part of the reason I'm taking this so seriously is because Daniel Miesler is usually a very optimistic person. He's not an AI doomsayer or anything like that. He doesn't think that it's coming for everyone's jobs and all this kind of stuff. So when he wrote this post, and we're going to get to it towards the end, it's like a list of things that if they all happened at the same time, could be really bad. Right off the bat, first thing on his list, a lot of really talented people are losing their jobs right now. So we're not talking like, oh, it's hard to claw your way into the industry. We're talking people with 10, 20 years of experience getting laid off, and they can't even get interviews right now. I'm with him. He says he knows multiple dozens of people or one degree separated from that are in this. High skilled people, high credentialed people can't even get an interview. Tons of businesses are straight up saying, hey, yeah, we are trying to replace huge portions of our team with AI. Google said it, Amazon said it, Salesforce is screaming it from the rooftops that they're not even hiring software engineers in 2025 citing AI productivity gain. My personal feeling on this is with massive layoffs, these companies always need a little bit of a PR reason. So that's why these things happen in waves, because they can point to all their peers around them and say, yeah, rough market right here. But I mean, when you have like 300,000 employees, like some of these companies do, there are 10,000 people that you can let go and like, keep chugging along in this business. No one likes to say that, right? It sucks. I'm not a layoff fan or anything, but PR is a big part of layoffs. And if they can point to AI, be like, yeah, we're laying off 10,000 people because of AI. Of course we are. The data is just not looking good on layoffs right now. And this is with current AI capabilities, which honestly are not replacing humans straight out in most roles. But important point here that Dan makes that I really like to hone in on is like, we saw this with GPT-5, it's like this super expensive, massive model, and it was kind of underwhelming for people. Everyone was expecting AGI and some PhD level stuff, because that's what Sam said. But it's not, right? It still makes all the same mistakes that AI makes. And so what Dan is saying, and I agree, is we don't need the next super uber trained model. We don't need GPT-6 or 7 that's going to like be a PhD and actually fulfill those promises. What people are actually building right now, I was just at Black Hat, the entire startup corner was AI socks, AI pen testers, all this kind of stuff. And what their IP is, what those companies, why they exist is because they're building scaffolding and piping that connects the right context and the right set of data to all these popular models. We're not talking about some cybersecurity company training their own model, right? They are just doing the right scaffolding and the right piping to get that stuff into Anthropic or OpenAI. A lot of this piping and scaffolding stuff is happening right now. You're seeing this giant wave of AI startups, that's what they're doing. They're building their like little internal AI agents to do one small function a lot better or at least help the humans doing it. He goes on to say, Salesforce say AI bots now do 50% of the company's work. I am calling BS on 50% of the work. Microsoft reports 30% of software coding is already done by AI. I can believe this just by sheer lines of code because AI coding tools are going to just put out a lot more code. So the percentages are going to look really impressive. The next thing on his list that actually worries him, he says the current non-AI based companies are not optimized. So this is what he thinks might actually be the precursor to even more layoffs is there's tons of companies out there that are not AI first and are not optimized to like use a lot of these things and move as fast as some of these newer companies are. So Dan's saying there are millions of people that are working at companies that are not running in an optimized way that might absolutely get bulldozed by a new challenger coming to the plate that's moving faster, leaner, and all this kind of stuff. I mean, this could be said of any technology wave, right? But in the context of this big list, I see what he's getting at here. I've been live streaming a lot and I get a ton of questions from people who are early in their career saying, should I even go learn coding right now? Should I even get in cybersecurity right now? I'm of the mind that yes, absolutely. I still think that I like the term humans to the power of AI, not AI replacing humans, right? But Dan's point here is if we know people with 10, 15, 20 years of experience that can't get interviews right now, how the hell is a new college grad supposed to find a job when experienced professionals can't? I understand that the market is kind of hard right now. I think that has a lot more to do with like the macro, right? Like everyone's kind of holding their breath, looking around going, what are we doing? But he says, why are we still telling people to pursue credentials that take years to earn, go into debt over earning it, and when those same credentials aren't protecting anyone from layoffs? I agree. I am not telling people to pursue those credentials. Go to college. Let your frontal cortex form. Live in the dorms. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, go have no responsibility, live in a walkable community, you know, with like low cost of living. Do not go into giant piles of debt over it. And a lot of people ask me, what certification should I get? I say none. Go on YouTube, learn a bunch of stuff, do a bunch of stuff. And then the real trick and the real thing that is saving people and the people that are getting hired right now are the people with the strongest personal brands and personal networks, professional networks. Who do you know? Who do you know that knows that you're a good person to work with and you're good at your job? It's really hard to stand in front of a resume right now or a degree right now and people take a chance on you. So when he says, really good question. I really thought about this a lot yesterday. I was on live talking about this. Who are the companies keeping? They're doing all these layoffs. Who are they keeping? That's who we should be focused on. He goes on to say, most workers are just checking in and checking out. He's calling it like he sees it here. I'm not a huge proponent of hustle culture and you got to go above and beyond. But when you're staring down a hard job market, it is hard to be the person that clocks in and clocks out. You are on the block to get replaced at that point. By definition, most workers are not exceptionals. Most workers and most work days are just drudgery, answering emails, writing quarterly plans, reviewing metrics. He's calling it like he sees it. I don't want to like be a proponent of hustle culture, but this is an important point in this conversation. Then he's looking at the economy. How the heck are even people keeping up with eating out or going to the movies? He's like, I go to restaurants all the time. I make good money. I look around and I'm like, how the heck is this place full? Well, he points out that credit card debt is at its absolute highest. The average American household now carries a 10 and a half thousand in credit card debt at average 22 and a quarter interest. That's insane. The tariffs haven't even fully hit yet. So the macro is still going to change under us. I like how Dan again makes good money and he goes, how the fuck did I even just pay $20 on a burger and a Diet Coke? Putting me aside, I look around and everyone around me, I'm like, how the hell is anyone affording this? I completely agree, right? Here's the full list of things he's worried about. A massive economic slowdown. New AI employee product gets announced that clearly can replace more workers. New layoff numbers get announced and it's hundreds of thousands of people. New data shows basically nobody is hiring. Enrollment in colleges plummet because there's no jobs to be had after you get into all that debt. Inflation jumps massively from tariffs and or other causes. People massively default on their credit card debt, can get no more credit. The industry suffers. Homelessness skyrockets because people can't pay their rent. We start to see unrest and riots against the rich because there's no jobs. People are getting evicted. Crime goes up. There's loud demand in government to outlawed AI replacement of workers. We get pulled into some new military conflict. I'm not reading this to be like the doomsayer. It's just an interesting thought to look at that list and go, all right, any one of those things pretty bad. If all of those things happen, are we resilient enough to face it? He's saying everything's too expensive, getting worse. We already have massive layoffs. Billions are being spent on replacing 100 million plus knowledge workers with AI. People are putting more and more on their credit cards. We're already in a collective mental health crisis due to fragmented media and out of control mis and disinformation. We no longer have a shared understanding of reality. We're primed by the media to fight each other because we no longer share that common reality. The U.S. debt just hit $37 trillion and everything above is getting worse, not better. Dan puts his personal prediction at this is somewhere between 40 and 80% likely to happen on all this stuff. I mean, you know, this is just vibes. I think I'm a little bit more optimistic than Dan overall on this whole list of things. I think we might, he might be right in the short to medium term that I think a lot of companies are going to do this. I think they're going to realize it's a mistake and they're going to start clawing people back. Right. They're going to overstate their efficiencies that they can gain. They're going to grab some profit and like, look at all this. And then I think they're going to go, oh, crap. We really need a lot more people to do all this stuff than we thought we did. But where are you at? This is a long video, but I wanted to go through this whole thing. I think it's a really good, well thought out post by Dan, who's usually an optimist. This was not optimistic. Where do you where do you fall on this? Do you think he's more right than wrong about a lot of this? I think he's probably more right than wrong on a lot of it, unfortunately. But I think I'm in camp slightly more optimistic than Dan on a few of these things. Advice to you is get your hands on this tech and learn it so that you can be part of the wave that's optimizing for it and build your network, meet people in real life, build trust with people. Trust is built over coffee and beer, not on a resume, a degree, a certification. If you've listened this long, you're going to love Dan's content. Follow his newsletter. My newsletter, Volneuil.com. If you're at the end of this video, please be a subscriber to Volneuil.com. Find me on YouTube. Find Dan around. We talk about a lot of this stuff all the time.