Making Sense of the World: AI, Layoffs, Debt and Opportunity

Hey everyone. They killed Sora on us, so we got to find something else to do our videos with, but we will. There'll still be something else.

Anyway, welcome to this week's Shimmy Says. I got to ask you all something, because I know me, people I know, are feeling a bit of this. Does the world feel just a little bit crazy to you right now?

I'm not talking about regular crazy. I mean, like really crazy. Like there are forces at play here beyond our control that it's just crazy.

Not even the normal news cycle. Yeah, that's crazy. Politics, beyond crazy.

But it just seems like everything is going crazy. We're living in a pressure pot. There's so many things going on day to day, hour to hour.

How do you keep up with it? This one's out. This one's in.

We're doing this. We're doing that. It's crazy.

Most of all, our technology. For those of us in tech, it's moving faster than many of us can even process. We got companies laying people off.

Oracle laid off a good chunk of their whole workforce this week, not because they're being replaced by AI. They're doing it so they could take that money to spend into their AI infrastructure product or into their AI infrastructure. Companies are laying off people.

At the same time, they're spending hundreds of billions of dollars. And it's not just companies. Countries are racing each other for AI dominance.

And it's not just China and the US, it's every country is trying to get their share of this AI pie. It just feels our economy, one day the stock market's crazy, the next day it's crazy down, it's back up, it's down. It ping pongs up and down because it moves with every announcement, every earning, and everything else.

It's not every few months, it's every day. For a lot of us, this is really unsettling. You look around and you think, "What exactly is going on here?

" Some days it feels like we're heading into the biggest, greatest boom period of humanity, of human history. Or are we walking down into Dante's Inferno's fourth layer of hell with one of the most disruptive tranches we've ever been in? Look, honestly, I think the answer is probably a little bit of both, and that's what I want to talk to you about today.

Because if you're trying to make sense of the world right now, my friends, you're not alone. We all are. On one hand, as I said, we're standing on this edge of what we think is something extraordinary, right?

I'm reminded of Hal telling Dave it's beautiful inside. Artificial AI is advancing faster than many of us even predicted. Physical AI, or robotics, as most of us call it, is right behind it, following real quickly, and right in that rear view mirror is quantum computing.

New breakthroughs every week, it seems. It's moving from labs into real-life systems, and we've got to deal with it. But when you put those three things together, this next, the rest of the '20s, early part of the '30s, could be the most definitive things happening to humanity ever.

This is akin to maybe fire, the wheel, the Industrial Revolution, and the internet. It's going to lead, or it could lead, to things like better medicine, better healthcare, better quality of life, longer life, new scientific discoveries all around, productivity gains, entirely new businesses and job occupations that didn't even exist a couple years ago. When historians look back at this period, they may very well call it one of the biggest turning points in human civilization.

And I honestly believe this. But there's another side to disruption. They don't call it disruption for no reason.

They call it disruption because it disrupts, and that disruption is already here. And I'm sure you realize it. As I mentioned before, the news coming out of Oracle, tens of thousands of jobs cut, a huge percentage of their workforce, but not because their jobs are being replaced by AI.

Don't jump to that conclusion. That's not what happened. They took the money from laying those people off, and they're investing it back into their AI infrastructures that they're building.

It's complicated. This massive infrastructure build-out required to power AI, data centers, GPUs, networking, energy infrastructure, cooling systems, the very people to build them, electricians and so forth, HVAC people. This is one of the largest capital investment cycles that we've ever seen in the tech industry.

It's not even hundreds of billions of dollars. It's trillions. $8 trillion, maybe more.

And someone has to pay for that. And when there's nowhere else to go, they're taking that money out of payroll. So think about that.

They are firing people to build these AI temples. That's what I call them, temples to AI. The infrastructure.

People talk about AI like it lives in the cloud. No, it lives somewhere. AI infrastructure is very physical.

It lives in these town, citywide physical facilities enormous facilities. And we call them data centers, but that doesn't even do it justice. You got to really think of them just like the Egyptians built temples back in the old days, we're building temples to AI.

They require unbelievable resources electricity, as I mentioned, water, steel, concrete, specialized chips, networking. And then what we've seen, people don't really talk about it, but we saw it come out today, tradesmen. We need electricians and pipe fitters and construction workers.

And you know what? We don't have enough of those trained people, and a lot of them that were, were immigrants that we just kicked out. So there are places, believe it or not, right now, where data center projects are being delayed because we just don't have enough skilled workers to build them, even if we had the power, the water, the chips and everything else.

Power itself is one of the biggest bottlenecks. We've got to build out our whole electric grid, and none of us want to pay for it. Let the people on the data center pay for it.

The energy demand from AI data centers is just skyrocketing, and our utilities are doing everything they can to scramble and keep up. Communities are pushing back because of their water usage and their land consumption and the noise it makes. But yet it's not slowing down.

The race continues. Because whoever builds the most capable AI infrastructure may end up controlling the future of technology, and with that, end up controlling the future of mankind. Here's another issue to think about, the debt question.

It's another layer to this. When we first started this build-out, all these Mag 7 tech bro companies were sitting on billions, tens, even hundreds of billions of dollars. But that money went up like in the first wave.

Now we're seeing massive debt to finance these AI build-outs, because how many people can you lay off, and how much money is that going to get you towards building out these data centers? So huge amount of debt being accumulated. The US government's no different.

We're in this up to our ears. We're financing enormous technology transitions. At the same time, we're carrying historic levels of national debt and adding to it every day.

Our debt exceeds our GDP, and no one can tell us how bad this balance sheet's going to look like 10 years from now. But we're all betting on the same things, that investing this enormous amount of money right now will result in the gains that AI eventually will eventually justify this investment. My friends, that's a really big bet.

I'm not saying it's a bad bet. I'm not saying it won't come true. But we're living on the edge.

It's a really big bet. But let me come from that and make it personal to you. The craziness you're feeling, a lot of it is insecurity about your own future.

Right? Let's get away from the global level. It's you, it's your job, it's your career, it's your family.

If you haven't thought about how AI might affect what you're doing for a living yet, then one of two things, either you're lying to yourself and me, or you're just walking around with blinders on, waiting for something to fall on you. But for the overwhelming majority of us, this should be a real concern. You got to be thinking about it.

Whether you're thinking about it late at night laying in bed, or during your commute into the office, for those of you who go into an office, maybe when you see another headline about this company's layoffs or that company's layoffs, it's got to strike home to you. And you know what? You're not alone.

It's a fair question, and in fact, it's the right question you should be asking. What does it mean to me? So what should you do with all of this?

Well, I wish I knew definitively, I'd tell you, but my advice is really simple. You don't retreat. You don't freeze.

You got to dive into this. You got to dive in headfirst. You got to learn how to use these tools, experiment with them.

Upskill yourself. Don't wait for it to bite you. Every company on Earth right now is asking the same question: how do we do more, better, for less?

AI, that's the whole point of this AI thing. It's forcing organizations to rethink how work gets done and how our workers work in it. I guarantee you, your employer's thinking about it.

Your competitors are thinking about it. Every startup founder on this planet is thinking about it. And you should be thinking about it, too.

If you're not, you're going to miss the boat here, and it's not going to end well. There's a global race going on, everyone. Right?

You zoom out further from the personal to the organization to the national level, and every nation is trying to figure out where they stand in this new world. How do they remain competitive? How do they remain sovereign and not dependent on another country?

How do we make sure the next generation of technology is not controlled somewhere else? Whether it's the US, China, Europe, the Middle East, even South America and Africa, and of course, Australia, we're all investing heavily. Semiconductor supply chains are readied-- Well, it's not much of a supply chain.

It goes from Taiwan to everywhere else. It's under intense pressure. AI infrastructure, national AI strategies.

Should we have them? Should we not? Some people compare this moment to the Cold War and the space race that took place then.

It's big. But here's the opportunity, and that's the good news. Here's the good news.

Hidden inside of all this chaos that you're feeling, of all that's swirling around us, is something still really incredible, and that's the opportunity. Because the opportunity here is the greatest I've ever seen as an entrepreneur. The greatest entrepreneurial opportunity of our lifetimes is sitting in front of us.

I was an entrepreneur before the dot-com, and I was an entrepreneur during the dot-com, and after the dot-com, and all the way through today. I spent decades building companies, and I got to honestly tell you something. My brain and my heart are racing every day in seeing what's possible with AI, with agentics, with everything going on now.

Because the opportunities, the possibilities are endless. Literally, one person, a laptop, and a powerful pipe into one AI system, you could build things that once required teams of dozens of peoples and engineers and months and years with departments and companies and capital. No more.

History shows us something interesting. A lot of the greatest companies in the world get started during periods of disruption, when big orgs are reorganizing, when people are leaving these large companies with real training, skill, and know-how, when the old rules stop working. We may be heading into another one of these moments right now.

So I fully expect to see a huge wave, maybe like we've never seen before, of new entrepreneurs, people starting their own businesses, building new products, solving problems that didn't even exist five years ago, coming up with novel ways of solving problems that did. AI may end up unlocking just a whole new kind of economic freedom if we let it. But here's the reality.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Not everyone's going to see it this way. Because there's always people who stay behind, the laggards.

People who refuse to believe what their own eyes and ears are telling them. We see it in so much of our society today. They think their opinions matter more than facts because everyone should have an opinion regardless of the facts.

But we see that, right? It's part of the problem in our society. But my friends, the writing is on the wall.

The world is changing, and it's changing a lot faster than you may realize. So if you're trying to make sense of this crazy world and period that we're living through right now, let me leave you with this. Yes, it's really disruptive.

Yes, it's quite unsettling. Yes, it raises real questions about jobs, our future careers, and the future in general, our children, our countries, our planet. But it's also the greatest technological adventure humanity has ever embarked on.

And adventures are not meant to be watched from the sidelines. They're meant to be lived through. So get in the game, learn the tools, build something, start something, push yourself, because the future's not going to fall on your head.

And if it does, it's going to kill you. It's out there waiting for people who have the imagination and the fire to go get it. And that, my friends, is how you make sense of this crazy world right now.

I'm Shimi. I'm out. I'll see you next week.

Shimi says, Shimi says, Shimi, Shimi, Shimi says, ask me almost anything.