← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
AI Job Market 2026: Why the 1 Million Job Revision is a Warning for White-Collar Workers | Tom's Deepive
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right now, millions of Americans are quietly losing their jobs. Not factory workers, not retail clerks, college educated professionals. The people who did everything right. They got a degree, landed a career, built a life around a salary that was supposed to be safe. And they're being told the economy's just fine. That is a lie. And I can prove it. But more importantly, I need you to understand what that lie is covering up. Because what's actually happening right now isn't a recession. It's not a downturn. It's not even a cycle. It's the beginning of the largest economic transformation any of us will live through. And if you understand what's really going on, this is also one of the greatest opportunities to build wealth that has existed in in our lifetimes. But if you don't, if you sit this out and wait for things to go back to normal, History has a very clear answer for what happens to people like you. And it's not good. So let me show you the lie first. Then I'll show you what it's hiding. And then I'll show you exactly what I think you should do about it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics just released their revised jobs numbers for 24 and 25. How much did they revise them by? A staggering 1 million jobs, down 1 million jobs the BLS claimed were created just never existed. Now, this data is hard to track accurately, so I get it. I expect some revisions over time, but in 2025 alone, they were off by 70%. 15% is an honest miscount. 70% is manipulation. And the revised number. Total non farm employment growth for 2025 was just 181,000 jobs for the entire year. That's 15,000 jobs per month. To put that into perspective, a single healthy month in the American economy produces more jobs than we created in all of 25. Even in 2010, as we were crawling our way out of the worst recession since the Great Depression, we were posting roughly 150,000 new jobs per month. 10 times what we just did. The only two year stretches in the 21st century with weaker job creation than 24 and 25 were the ones where the economy was in full blown crisis. The, the dot com bust, the Great Recession. And back then, at least we were honest about the fact that we had a problem. Right now, no one is even sounding an alarm. These are recession level numbers, full stop. But you've got to understand why no one is calling it that. And to understand why this recession is different from what's come before, you have to look at where the losses are. Because the softness is not spread evenly across the economy. Healthcare is still adding jobs. Construction is still adding jobs. The losses are concentrated in a very specific place. Cognitive. Heavy white collar roles. SaaS, companies, middle management, creative work, marketing. The exact jobs that millions of people went to college to get, and the exact jobs that built the modern middle class. And that tells you something critical. Normal business cycles do not selectively gut the knowledge economy while leaving everything else intact. When you see surgical cuts to cognitive work while manual labor holds steady, you're not looking at a cycle, you're looking at a substitution. Something is replacing those roles, not delaying them, replacing them. Those of you paying attention, I know already know what this something is. It's AI adoption. But it's moving faster than anyone in the government is willing to admit. Here's what I want you guys to understand, because it explains where we're headed. This is not the first time technology has rewritten the rules of who gets to earn a living. We've been here before, multiple times, and every single time the same pattern plays out. The economy gets richer. The people at the top, they capture the gains almost immediately when these transformations happen. But the ordinary people who were trained in the old system, they get destroyed, predictably. Not for a year, not for a rough quarter, for decades, sometimes for the rest of their lives. The Luddite fallacy, the oft repeated idea that technology always creates more jobs than it destroys, is true in the long run. But in moments of transformation, the long run has equated to between 40 and 80 years. And in the short run, people's lives are wrecked. While the government lies about what's happening, the political system tears itself apart and the wealth gap explodes to dangerous levels. That's the pattern, and it's playing out again right now in real time in front of us. So what I want to do with this video is walk you through the lie that the jobs report just exposed. The historical pattern, what I believe is coming next, including the political instability that always follows this kind of displacement. And what exactly I think you should do to ensure you come out on the right side of all of this. Because the people who see these transitions clearly and position themselves early don't just survive them. They come out ahead, way ahead, and often for an entire generation. Let's start with the history, because this is where it all starts becoming clear. In 1810, a master handloom weaver in England earned more than most factory owners. By 1840, the same trade paid less than child labor in a coal mine. As British GDP doubled, real wages for the working class went down for 50 years. The economy got richer, but the people got poorer. Economists have a name for this period of history. They call it the Angle's Pause. And it's about to happen again here in the US over the next few years, as people fret about AI's growing impact on white collar jobs. You're going to hear a lot of smart people throw around a phrase, the Luddite Fallacy. This is the logic that all throughout history, every time there has been a technological revolution like the one we're living through right now. Ultimately, despite the initial job losses, more jobs are created than are lost. It's a statement that is both true and extraordinarily misleading. The true story that gave rise to the name the Luddite Fallacy is part of a historical loop that repeats over and over as technology advances. There are three revolutions that we have great data for that paint a very clear picture of what's going to happen as AI transforms the entire labor market. Let's speedrun the pattern so we can understand the meteorite that is screaming towards civilization right now. In the early 1800s, English textile workers called the Luddites started smashing machines because they were terrified those machines would take their jobs. Economists look at that reaction and they laugh. With hindsight, they know what would have been impossible to see at the time. In the long run, technology creates more jobs than it destroys and everyone gets richer. It is true. Well, at least eventually. But as we're going to see, the people who actually live through these periods of transition, they get crushed. And I don't mean metaphorically. Not. They had a few rough years. When I say crushed, I mean their lives were destroyed. And in most cases they died long before the economy came back for people like them. So while the Luddite fallacy is true in the macro, it is absolutely brutal in the micro. Let's look at the details. It took 60 to 80 years for the gains of industrialization to reach ordinary people. 60 to 80 years. The reforms, the labor laws, the factory acts. None of that happened automatically. People had to fight for decades to get any of it. If you were a Displaced Weaver in 1800, you almost certainly died long before the economy caught back up to your class. Your grandchildren got the benefit, but you got the grave. Same story with electrification and mass production. The late 1800s brought brought electricity, assembly lines and mechanized agriculture. And once again, it gutted the people trained in the Old World. Millions of farmers and rural craftspeople were pushed off the land into cities where they had no skills, no networks and no safety net. Sears was the Amazon of its day. And it also wiped out local economies in the exact same way. Who won first in that moment? The Gilded Age robber barons? The Carnegie's, The Rockefellers? Skilled industrial workers also started doing well relatively fast. But everybody else, they got a mouthful of grinding poverty. It took 40 to 60 years, plus the New Deal, a world war and the GI Bill to turn the gain of mass production into a broad middle class. If you were a displaced farmer in 1890, your grandchildren in the 1950s were living in suburban homes with union jobs. But you probably spent your life in a tenement or sharecropping those chickens. Took two generations to come home and finally roost. Then there's the Internet. This one's close enough that we can really count the bodies. When the Internet hit, it did not just hollow out blue collar work, it came for white collar jobs as well. Travel agents, print journalists, retail workers, administrative staff, middle managers. If your job could be digitized by vjooqic, you were a target. The research here is devastating. Manufacturing workers displaced in the 2000s showed persistent wage losses for the rest of their careers and the deaths of despair research. The surge in suicides, overdoses and liver disease from drinking in middle America connects directly to this displacement. The gains flowed almost entirely to college educated workers in a handful of cities. San Francisco, Seattle, New York. Everyone else just fell behind. Here's the unavoidable truth. Hang tight. We'll be back in just a moment.
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If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
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All right, we're back. Let's get into it. We are roughly 30 years into the Internet transition, and the gains are still concentrated at the top. And to make matters dramatically more complicated, we haven't even finished absorbing the last revolution, and AI is now about to drop a bomb on top of it all. The pattern across all three revolutions is the economy gets richer. It really does. The Luddite fallacy holds in the aggregate, but the people trained in the old system just get clobbered. The capital class captures the gains almost immediately. Immediately. And then it takes 40, 60, 80 years plus massive political upheaval for the benefits to reach ordinary people. Now, I'm not even saying that should be different. It's just the way that the system metabolizes this change. And none of it happens automatically. People have to fight for the change every single time. And that brings us to the part that makes this moment different from every revolution that came before it. Because at least in the prior transitions, the technology augmented the workers. The loom still needed a lot of operators. The assembly line still needed humans at every station. The Internet still needed people to manage all of the workflows, as has happened every time before. It created more jobs. That is not the problem. It's a question of timescale. And on top of that, there's always been what I'll call the human bridge. A person standing between the tool and the outcome. A manager translating strategy into execution, a worker translating machine capability into a finished product. Technology got better, but it still needed a lot of humans in the loop. AI agents may not eliminate that bridge in the next decade, but they are dramatically reducing it in a way that's never happened before. For the first time in history, we have a technology that doesn't just make workers more productive. It replaces the need for many of the workers entirely in a growing number of cognitive tasks. That's substitution through augmentation. How many people do you need in your business army if you can step inside of the equivalent of a mech suit and just do the vast majority of the work yourself? If you're ambitious, this is absolutely thrilling. I'm living this right now. I'm building a video game. And because of AI, I'm literally just teaching myself more and more how to code the game myself so that I can get more done and I don't have to hire as many people. It's literally expanding what the game can be. It allowed me to dramatically reduce the number of people working on it while expanding what we're able to accomplish. What we've been able to do in year four of development versus year one with a much smaller team now is. Is nothing short of staggering. And it's at least 90% due to AI as a company. I look at our profit and loss statement and I see revenue going up while my payroll is going down. I made more revenue in 2025 than any previous year, and I did it with less people. As an entrepreneur that's been in the game for nearly 25 years, this is surreal. But when I look at the history of technological revolutions like this, I see this terrifying pattern. Repeat. If you understand investing, you're going to be fine. If you're young and adaptable, you're going to be fine. If you're entrepreneurial, you've got a window of extreme opportunity. But if you're in the heart of your career, you're in extreme danger of being left behind and never recovering. History just does not care about any of us individually. It doesn't even care about entire generations. And unfortunately, by the numbers, the vast majority of people, and we're talking roughly 90% of adults here, are most likely to be in the camp of people who are in danger. Now, here's a question that you should be asking. If the revised job numbers are recession level bad, why won't anyone just call it what it is? Because they can't. A politician's job is not to lead, it's to get reelected. And as long as pointing out a recession is likely to decrease the number of votes a given political party receives, they're just going to refuse to call it a recession. So Trump, who is actively deporting cheap labor but wants the stock market to rise, is going to have to paint A rosy picture for as long as he can. This will give him the time that he needs to ensure the US maintains AI supremacy, which is critical to national security and economic prosperity. And it will also act as the new cheap labor and the propellant that keeps the stock market going up, all the while allowing him to fund his reckless deficit spending through techno fueled growth. The Democrats on the other hand, led by the democratic socialist progressive wing via aoc, Bernie and Mamdani, will become more and more aggressively opposed to AI. Bernie Sanders has already called for a moratorium on new data center construction. He held a public dialogue with AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, the so called called godfather of AI, at Georgetown, banging the drum on the urgent need for regulation. Because hey, who doesn't want to be more like Europe and watch our entire economy decline relative to the rest of the world decade after decade as we are slowly smothered by a mountain of regulations. Nonetheless, progressive Democrats have made AI a core policy priority, calling for protections for working class and white collar jobs, bans on AI and military decision making and environmental safeguards, and on energy hungry data centers. And despite what game theory tells us about how stupid and shortsighted that would be on a world stage, polls show that the public is understandably with them. A University of Maryland survey found that bipartisan majorities of Americans favor government regulation of AI. People are scared, and based on everything we've just gone through, why wouldn't they be? And the progressive left is positioning itself as the answer. Now, I'm not telling you all of this so that you can pick a side. I'm telling you this because you need to understand the historical pattern that's playing out right now. What's happening is exactly what happens every time we go through something like this. Whenever the middle class is weakened and being hollowed out and the government refuses to acknowledge it, you get a political split. The right says, let the market rip, the growth will save us. The left says, right, regulate everything, protect the workers. And while they fight each other, the actual transition rolls right over ordinary people. And in fairness to the politicians, technological progress has never, not even once, been stopped in the entire history of the human race. It is a truly unstoppable force, because as I've said many, many times, any technology that promises to an advantage will be developed without question, no matter how dire the consequences may be. This is a movie we have seen before, more than once. And knowing how it ends is the only thing that's going to help you profit from it. So here it goes, once more unto history. We must turn. In the 1890s, in the wake of the second industrial revolution, the panic of 1893 hit. In a single year, unemployment went from 3% to nearly 19%. Banks failed. Businesses collapsed at a rate of two dozen per day. Millions of displaced farmers and craftspeople who had already been struggling for decades were now in outright poverty. And the government did nothing. A businessman named Jacob Coxey literally marched an army of unemployed workers from Ohio to Washington D.C. begging Congress to create public works jobs. Congress's response? They arrested him for walking on the grass outside of the Capitol building. That was the federal government's answer to mass unemployment. What followed? The Populist party exploded in size. State militias were called in to put down the Homestead strike. Federal troops crushed the Pullman strike. The country tore itself apart for the better part of a decade before the Progressive Era reforms even began to address the underlying problems. And those reforms only happened because the instability became so severe that the ruling class had no choice but to concede. Same pattern after 2008. The Great Recession wiped out 8.7 million jobs and trillions in household wealth. The government's first instinct? Save the banks, bail out aig, bail out the lenders who caused the crisis and the average person who lost their home, thoughts and prayers. What followed? Occupy Wall street on the left, the Tea Party on the right. Both movements were born from the exact same anger. The sense that the government represents well organized special interest groups at the general public's expense. That anger didn't go away when those movements faded. It just went underground. And then it resurfaced in 2016 with Trump and Sanders, two candidates who had almost no nothing in common ideologically, but who both ran on the same fundamental the system is rigged against you. And they were right. It is right now. Here is the nightmarish truth. The 2008 displacement was a financial crisis, a credit bubble, a one time event. It was brutal, but the jobs eventually came back. It took six years, but they did come back because the underlying demand for human labor was still there. What we're entering now is not a one time event. It is a permanent structural shift. The jobs disappearing in 2025 are not coming back in 2027, not in 2030, not ever. They are being automated out of existence. Each human will simply be able to do more. And when the population is declining, there's a limit to what needs to be done. This will drive people to gamble. The sophisticated people will gamble in the stock market, which is way less risky in the long run. But the masses will gamble on Kalshi and Polymarket, where over time you are guaranteed to lose. And that's why, unlike in 2008, the people who own a well diversified basket of assets are going to do just fine. Equities are up. If you own assets, this AI transition might be the best thing that ever happened to your board portfolio. But if you don't own assets, if you're part of the 90% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, trying to save your way to prosperity while inflation eats you alive, you're watching the K shaped economy become a permanent K shaped civilization. Housing is up 50% in five years, wages are flat, the labor market is hemorrhaging cognitive jobs. And on one side you, you've got Trump telling you AI is going to make America rich while still running trillion dollar deficits. Fingers crossed. And on the other you've got Bernie calling for an AI moratorium, AOC calling for regulation, and Mamdani trying to tax everything under heaven to give things away for free. All of which sounds great until you realize that every country that overtaxes or tries to slow down technological adoption just hands the advantages to the countries that don't. Neither side has a real answer because neither side can afford to tell you the truth, which is that this transition is going to be extraordinarily painful for a very large number of people. And the political system as it currently exists is just not designed to help them. You cannot have this level of displacement, this level of toxic wealth inequality, this level of institutional dishonesty, this level and expect social stability. It's not how humans work, it's not how history works. The Gilded Age made this abundantly clear. The Great Depression repeated the lesson. 2008 hammered at home when people can't make ends meet, when they feel like the system is lying to them, which it is. When they watch the rich get richer while they fall farther behind, they don't sit quietly and wait for the next election cycle. They get mad. And that anger always finds an outlet. Sometimes the outlet is productive. New political movements reform regulation that eventually rebalances the system. But sometimes it's destructive, sometimes it's extremism, sometimes it's worse. And almost always it takes decades to sort out. We are already deep in the populist moment. The polarization, the institutional distrust, the fury on both sides of the aisle. None of that appeared out of nowhere. It's the downstream effect of 30 years of Internet era displacement combined with globalism that we never properly addressed, compounded by a debt fueled K shaped economy. That makes it nearly impossible for ordinary people to get ahead. And now AI is busy pouring gasoline on that fire. And the only thing more dangerous than letting it burn would be to try to smother it. So what does this mean for you? It means if you're sitting there thinking, I just need to wait for the market to recover and I'll get another desk job. Sure, but only if you are an AI master. Because over the next decade, there will be fewer and fewer of those jobs left. Anyone who is waiting for a return to normal is waiting for a world that's not coming back. The jobs numbers bear that out. The historical pattern bears that out. But the government is not going to confirm it because they can't afford to. This is a game of psychology, not fundamentals. It's not a game of telling the truth about the history. It's a game of obfuscating everything and then letting the sophisticated walk away with the prize, as has happened every time throughout history. But there's a little bit of good news. Every single one of these transitions, as brutal as they were, also created massive opportunity for people who saw it coming. The people who understood what was actually happening and positioned themselves accordingly. The people who avoid debt and preserve optionality and buy when there's blood in the street always come out ahead for an entire generation. When you have a moment of transition like this one, and this moment, it's just no different. The opportunity is real, but you have to see clearly and you have to act. So let me tell you what I think you should actually do. First, stop thinking like an employee and start thinking like an entrepreneur and capital allocator. Your cash sitting in a savings account is not safe. Every dollar you earn but don't deploy is a dollar. The system is designed to take from you slowly. So the single most important shift you can make right now is to stop saving and start owning things. The right things. That means getting into assets, equities, commodities, gold, precious metals, Bitcoin, real estate, et cetera. Not 10 different tech stocks. That's just 10 ways to bet on the same outcome. You want uncorrelated assets that respond differently to different stressors. You don't have to be perfect. Just avoid investing on margin and play the long game. Second, keep six to 12 months of living expenses in cash. Not because cash is a great investment, it is not. But because the worst thing you can do in a downturn is be forced to sell your assets at the bottom. Liquidity keeps you emotionally sober when everyone else around you is losing their minds. Third, learn AI. Not casually, not. I tried ChatGPT once. I mean actually sit down and learn how to use these tools and at a professional level to multiply your output. Get better than everyone else. As the prevailing wisdom goes, AI is not going to take your job. A person using AI is going to take your job. The people with the deepest mastery of AI will be the people that are the most valuable for at least the next five to 10 years. And companies right now are already making hiring decisions based on that reality. You can be the person who commands an AI augmented workflow, or you can be the person who gets replaced by one. There really is no third option for white collar workers. Fourth, if you have any entrepreneurial instinct at all, now is the time. The barriers to starting a business have never been lower. You can launch a product, build a brand and run operations with AI doing work that used to require an entire department. You can do it by yourself. The window for small, lean AI native businesses is wide open right now. But it's not going to stay open forever. It's not even going to stay open for long. Right now, the advantage belongs to the fast and the efficient. And fifth, don't try to predict the future. Preserve your optionality. The specifics on how AI reshapes the economy is guaranteed to surprise all of us. Your job is not to guess which surprises are coming, coming. Your job is to be positioned so you can absorb the shocks and capitalize on the opportunities as they emerge. Now, let me bring all of this full circle. Remember, what's happening right now has happened over and over throughout history. In these moments of transition, the government's going to lie to you. They are going to try to keep you blind to what is actually happening. At the end of the day, this displacement will eat up an entire generation, possibly two. And the only people that are going to win are going to be the people that position themselves to own things so that they can thrive during this period of transition. To the owners always go the spoils act. Now, boys and girls, the displacement is real, it is structural and it is accelerating. History tells us exactly what happens next. The capital class will capture the gains. The middle will get hollowed out. The political system will fracture as it is already. And it takes decades of upheaval before the benefits will reach. Ordinary people don't be ordinary people. That's the pattern. It's never once failed to repeat. If you're going to win, you don't need to be lucky. You need to be prepared in the long run. The Luddite fallacy is Indeed true. Smashing the looms or whatever machine, or in our case, the D data centers. It's not the play. In the long run, AI will make society as a whole much, much richer. But we don't live in the long run. We live in the right now. And right now, the only question that matters is whether you're going to be the person who saw this coming or the person who got blindsided. Alright, that's it for today's episode. If you got value out of this, it would mean the world to me if you would go give us a five star rating. It helps more than you know. All right, thank you and until next time, my friends. Be legendary. Take care. Peace.
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