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Moonshot Minute

Moonshot Consulting

AI is rewriting hiring faster than HR can keep up. Moonshot Minute is short, sharp intelligence on recruiting tech, employment data, and the human cost the headlines skip. For recruiters, founders, and anyone watching AI reshape work. New episodes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Hosted by L. David Oliver, founder of Moonshot Consulting. Full breakdowns on Substack: bit.ly/moonshotsubstack No fluff. Just signal.

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All Episodes

00:03:59

Midweek Edition: Alphabet Just Answered the Big Question

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/07/23

Alphabet reported $105.8 billion in revenue last night. Google Cloud up 35%. YouTube ads up 18%. EPS of $2.98 beat estimates.But the real headline: $43.7 billion in AI CapEx for the quarter. Up 160% year over year. CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is "in the early stages of the AI opportunity" and called the data center build-out critical to Alphabet's future.Tesla: $32.4 billion revenue. $3.4 billion free cash flow burn. Stock fell 3% after hours.Alphabet spent $43.7 billion on AI

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00:04:43

Episode 26: The Denominator Problem

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/07/20

The unemployment rate fell to 4.2 percent. That sounds like good news. It is not.720,000 people left the labor force in June. The participation rate dropped to 61.5 percent, the lowest since 1976. Over a million workers have exited in the past year. The math improves. The lives don't.CPI dropped to 3.5 percent. Energy prices fell 5.7 percent. That should be a green light for hiring. But the labor force is moving in the opposite direction. Indeed projects a 5.9 million worker shortage by

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00:05:47

Friday Rant: The Fed Chair Just Said the Quiet Part...

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/07/17

Inflation is cooling. AI investment is surging. The layoff tracker just crossed 200,000. And the new Fed Chair admitted the AI buildout might not pay off.Thomson Reuters cut 500 engineers. Sprout Social slashed 20% of its workforce. Volkswagen is looking at 100,000 job cuts. KPMG Australia is axing over a thousand. The week kept going.Warsh announced Marc Andreessen is advising the Fed on jobs and productivity. The same Andreessen who said AI layoffs are "100 percent incorrect." Let that

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00:03:21

Midweek Edition: The War That Changes Everything

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/07/15

On Monday, we laid out the week ahead. CPI, bank earnings, and the new Fed Chair's first testimony. All on the same morning.We were wrong. The war that everyone thought was on hold is back.The U.S. reimposed a naval blockade on all Iranian ports. Iran's Revolutionary Guards struck U.S. bases in Bahrain and Kuwait. Oil prices spiked 15 percent in seven days. The Strait of Hormuz, where 20 percent of global oil passes, is closed again.Here is what that means for the job market. The hiring

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00:06:01

Episode 25: The Record Quarter Nobody Announced

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/07/13

Microsoft cut 4,800 workers. Cloudflare cut 20% of its workforce during its highest revenue quarter ever. Coinbase is building "one-person teams." PayPal and Block are slashing staff. Record revenue. Record cuts.This isn't a recession. It's a restructuring. And the difference matters because a recession ends. A restructuring doesn't reverse.Tuesday: CPI, bank earnings, and the new Fed Chair's first testimony. All at once.The uncounted won't be mentioned in any of those reports. They never

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00:06:02

Friday Rant: The Shovel Sellers Are Calling Out the...

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/07/11

Jensen Huang, whose company sells the chips this entire AI boom runs on, called CEOs who blame AI for layoffs lazy. The man selling the shovels says you are not actually digging.Microsoft cut 4,800 roles. Oracle cut 21,000. Cloudflare, GitLab, Meta, Cisco — the list keeps growing. Record revenue, record cuts. AI washing is the new corporate cover story.June payrolls added 57,000 jobs — less than half of what analysts expected. The unemployment rate fell to 4.2 percent, but 720,000 people left the

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00:02:26

Moonshot Minute Midweek: The Microsoft Cut

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/07/08

Microsoft cut 4,800 jobs this week. Xbox took the biggest hit. 3,200 roles. Four game studios being spun off or sold.The June Challenger report shows AI was the leading cause of layoffs for the fourth straight month. Over 101,000 AI-linked cuts in 2026.Here is what the press releases skip. Firms that cut headcount after AI pilots are not seeing the returns they expected.If you are a founder trying to hire through this, the talent you need is skeptical and selective. That is what we

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00:07:22

Episode 24: The Spectacle and the Spreadsheet

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/07/06

850,000 fireworks lit up the National Mall. A nine-hour military flyover. The Salute to America celebration cost $103 million. The parade for ordinary people? Canceled because of an around 115-degree heat index.But that's not the story. The story is the spreadsheet behind the spectacle. The President's financial disclosure shows 327 stock purchases on the day before a tariff pause that sent the S&P 500 up 9.5 percent.Meanwhile, 333,000 federal jobs have been lost since January 2025. Real wages

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00:02:14

The Jobs Report You Can't Trust

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/07/03

The jobs report dropped today. 57,000 jobs added in June. Economists expected 115,000. A 67 percent miss. Wall Street celebrated anyway.Here is what the headlines are not telling you. The numbers you are reading are probably wrong.The Bureau of Labor Statistics has overcounted nearly 3 million jobs over the past three years. The agency's survey response rates have collapsed. The data is revised months later, after the markets have already moved. And the people who were supposed to fix the

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00:02:07

Mid-Week Edition: The AI Transformation That Was...

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/07/01

British American Tobacco announced 9,000 job cuts this week. The CEO called it building a "future-ready organization." AI got the credit.Here is what the press release did not tell you. Of those 9,000 roles, 5,500 are actual cuts. The other 3,500 are being handed to Accenture and other outsourcers. That is not AI taking a job. That is the same job, moved somewhere cheaper, with an AI story stapled to the announcement.Forrester estimates half of AI-attributed layoffs get quietly rehired

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00:05:19

Episode 23: The AI Hangover

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/06/29

OpenAI just delayed its IPO. Anthropic pulled its most powerful models. Uber burned its entire AI budget in four months. Meta warned of billions in internal AI costs.The companies pushing AI hardest are now putting limits on it.Not on the layoffs. Over 150,000 tech workers have lost their jobs this year — 44 percent faster than last year.Mark Cuban spent this week asking: What if the AI boom collapses like the dot-com bubble?The uncounted are the engineer training her replacement. The applicant

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00:03:49

Friday Rang: The Oracle's Confession

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/06/26

Oracle just admitted AI cost them 21,000 jobs. Thirteen percent of its workforce. They also warned that the cuts "may lead to shortages of sufficiently skilled employees" and "damage to employee morale and retention."The company that just cut 21,000 people is now worried it might not have enough skilled workers.That is not a contradiction. It is a confession.This episode of the Moonshot Minute breaks down the gap between what companies say to investors and what they say to the

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00:03:19

Eposide 22: The One Percent Blind Spot

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/06/22

Gallup just surveyed 23,000 American workers. When laid-off employees were asked why they lost their jobs, only one percent said AI.That sounds like good news. It isn't.Workers who don't use AI were three times more likely to be laid off than those who do. In tech, the gap was even worse: 6% layoff risk for monthly AI users, 18% for everyone else. Nobody got a termination letter that said: "replaced by algorithm." They got told it was a restructuring. The outcome was the

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00:02:14

Friday Rant: The Uncounted Juneteenth Episode

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/06/19

Happy Juneteenth, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. Normally on the Moonshot Minute, we talk about AI and work and the people the headlines leave behind. But today I'm taking a different path. Today we're going to talk about Juneteenth, about the two and a half years between a proclamation and freedom actually arriving, and about what that delay tells us about how systems treat the people at the margins. It's a bit of a departure, but I think it's the right one. Thanks for being

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00:04:02

Episode 21: One Headline, Two Realities

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/06/15

The May jobs report was a blowout. 172,000 jobs added. Unemployment at 4.3 percent.Here is what the headlines did not tell you. Half of all industry sectors have lost jobs over the past year. The share of long-term unemployed workers rose to 27.5 percent – up from 20.4 percent a year ago. Tech layoffs have now reached nearly 150,000 people in 2026, a 44 percent increase in pace over last year. AI was the leading cause of job cuts for the third straight month.Google quietly laid off cybersecurity

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00:02:11

Friday Rant: The Uncounted: AI's Quiet Reckoning

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/06/12

Google quietly cut its cybersecurity team this week. The stated reason? Reinvest in AI. The irony? AI amplifies the attack surface. It does not eliminate the need for security.Broader 2026 numbers tell the same story. 97,006 job cuts in May. The highest May total since 2020. For the third straight month, AI was the leading reason cited. Tech layoffs have climbed 65 percent year over year.Meanwhile, long-term unemployment is rising. The share of workers out of work for 27 weeks or more hit 27.5

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00:02:47

Episode 20: The Vibes Are Crashing

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/06/08

blowout. Then the Nasdaq dropped 4.2 percent.Here is why. 60 percent of money in US stocks sits in passive funds. They don't evaluate risk. They just buy the top 10 tech names on autopilot. And those top 10 names now make up 34 percent of index profits.But the real story is circular. Google booked $29 billion in profit last quarter from marking up its stake in Anthropic — not from search, ads, or cloud. Passive money flows in. AI valuations go up. Repeat.Meanwhile, AI was the leading cause of

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00:02:04

The Jobs Report Smashed Expectations. The Uncounted...

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/06/05

The US economy added 172,000 jobs in May. The headlines are celebrating.Here is what the headlines did not tell you. Healthcare and government carried the load. Private sector growth remains soft. Employers announced over 97,000 job cuts in May, and for the third straight month, AI was the leading cause.The uncounted are not in the BLS revisions. They are the data scientist still serving tables. The engineer cut to fund more GPUs. The professional ghosted by an AI screener.No fluff. Just what is

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00:04:50

Episode 18 - The Zero Evidence Problem

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/06/01

Apollo's chief economist says there is zero evidence AI is killing jobs. The layoffs are real. The AI narrative is not holding up.This is Episode 18 of Moonshot Minute. One story. No fluff. Just what's actually happening.

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00:01:00

Episode 17: The Zero ROI Purge

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/05/26

Last week Meta dropped the axe. 8,000 employees terminated, many getting the news at 4 AM Singapore time. Another 7,000 forcibly reassigned to AI pods. 6,000 open roles eliminated. All while Meta posts record revenue and plans to burn up to $145 billion on AI this year.When an analyst asked Zuckerberg about ROI, he called it "a very technical question" and admitted there's no precise plan.A Gartner survey of 350 executives found that companies cutting the most people are not seeing the

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