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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

00:06:17

Episode 34 - Back To The Future

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/10/05

September added 29,000 jobs. Economists wanted about 90,000. The weekend did not rescue the number. July is now a loss, and this morning services hiring was back to a dead heat while prices stayed hot.Information, finance, and professional services shrank. Wages are up 3 percent. August prices were up 3.4 percent. Wednesday brings the Fed minutes from a meeting that still said job gains were keeping pace. Thursday is claims. September prices come out October 14.Moonshot Minute is hosted by L. David

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00:03:15

Screening Layer - The Legal Landscape

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/09/29

A tool ranked a person. The receipt for that rank never left the building.The receipt that covers a job in this country is still Title VII. A score that screens people out is a selection procedure. The EEOC wrote that down in 2023. In January 2025 the pamphlet came off the site. The statute did not.New York City has required a local receipt since July 2023: a yearly bias audit, a public summary, and notice. Through June 2025 the city had received two complaints. Illinois, since January 1, 2026, made

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00:06:37

Episode 34 - The AI Efficiency Theater

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/09/28

Three companies said transformation last week. All three meant cheaper.Novo Nordisk cut 13,000 jobs. Microsoft cut another 268 inside Xbox on top of roughly 1,600 earlier. Then Paychex launched an AI recruiting tool that promises to find talent four times faster.The story is about the future. The mechanism is about the cost line.Here is what nobody is saying. AI efficiency has become the language for correcting a hiring binge, moving money from payroll to data centers, and cutting the management

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00:06:14

162,000 Jobs. Information Lost 23,000. Guess the...

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/09/26

The AI apocalypse was "postponed" this month. The people doing the work did not get the memo.August added 162,000 jobs. Information lost 23,000 in the same month. Financial activities lost 11,000. The sectors most soaked in AI transformation are quietly shrinking while restaurants and school districts carry the headline.Crunchbase: tech layoffs through August are already 17 percent ahead of 2025. AI is the cited reason in a third of those events. In 2024 it was 1 percent.Census asked firms

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00:02:55

Where the System Fails Both Sides

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/09/24

The stack does not fail in public. It fails in a folder nobody opens, and in a yes that looks like last year's hire.A false no is someone who could do the job and never meets a person. A false yes looks like the last people you hired and cannot do the work. The human only sees the one who got through.88 percent of employers told Harvard Business School and Accenture that qualified high-skill candidates get dumped for not matching the job post word for word. 94 percent said the same for mid-skill

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00:09:44

Friday Rant - Nobody Got Fired This Week. They Got...

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/09/19

Oracle locked people out of Slack before the email landed. GAO priced the empty federal chairs at $9.5 billion. The government paid 144,000 people to stop working, then hired 20,000 of the same roles back. Same trick. Different letterhead.This is Moonshot Minute. AI, work, and the people caught in between. One story. No fluff. Just what is actually happening.Hosted by L. David Oliver. Founder and CEO, Moonshot Consulting.

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00:06:55

Episode 33 - They Discounted the Model and Called It...

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/09/11

GSA just put ChatGPT on sale for the federal government. Twenty-seven months. Fifty percent off token usage. No minimum.Three days ago The Intercept published something that makes that announcement land very differently. The Pentagon asked OpenAI for a custom version of its AI designed to turn down military commands as infrequently as possible. "Minimal refusal rates."Six months ago Anthropic lost up to a billion dollars in government revenue for refusing to build that version. A judge

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00:09:03

Friday Rant: They Flattened the Chart and Called It...

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/09/04

Uber cut 3,300 people this week. The Trade Desk cut 15 percent. BLS added 162,000 jobs. Information lost seats anyway.The industry has a liturgy now. You cut the middle. You fund the robot. You tell the Street you are getting simpler.A Stanford paper found workers 22 to 25 in AI-exposed jobs are 19 percent below where they would be. The on-ramp is not breaking. It is being removed before anyone gets on it.They did not fire the work. They fired the people who used to teach the work, then pointed at a

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00:06:44

Episode 32: The Quiet Cuts

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/08/31

Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk on September 30. 500,000 workers. 190 countries. The machines have finished learning. This is the quiet cut.Episode 32 of Moonshot Minute. AI, work, and the people caught in between.

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00:06:18

Friday Rant: The Government Just Asked the Cutters...

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/08/28

The Labor Department admitted it does not have the data on how AI is changing jobs. So it asked OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Amazon to help count the cuts.The NSA wants access to "all" AI models. The benchmark for what qualifies will remain classified.Tech layoffs in 2026 have crossed 127,000. Already more than all of 2025. The government is asking the cutters to become the statisticians.🎙️ Spotify – Moonshot Minute📺 YouTube – @MoonshotConsultingDC📱 TikTok –

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00:05:35

Episode 31: The Efficiency Is in the Headcount

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/08/24

Starbucks cut 224 jobs. Apple trimmed 200. A lawsuit exposed the black box that screens people out without them ever knowing. The job market looks stable. The squeeze is happening underneath.This episode of the Moonshot Minute breaks down the relocation squeeze, the product pivot, and the Eightfold AI lawsuit that could change how every company screens candidates.🎙️ Spotify – Moonshot Minute📺 YouTube – @MoonshotConsultingDC📱 TikTok – @moonshotconsultingdc#MoonshotMinute #Starbucks #Apple

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00:05:20

Episode 30: The Soft Underbelly

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/08/17

July's jobs report sent a signal. The economy lost 23,000 jobs. Unemployment ticked down to 4.1 percent. May and June were revised down by a combined 103,000. The soft landing is looking more like a soft underbelly.Etsy cut 12 percent of its workforce while announcing a $2 billion buyback. Rapid7 cut 12 percent while lowering revenue guidance. TikTok closed its Nashville office. Cloudflare cut 20 percent while posting record revenue. The pattern is consistent. Revenue up. Spending on AI up

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00:08:08

Friday Rant: The Flatline

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/08/15

Twenty-six Meta employees are suing, claiming internal AI systems selected them for layoffs because they took medical leave, parental leave, or disability accommodation.One scientist got her notice while on prenatal leave. Her water broke the next day. She gave birth the day after. A designer with a newborn was the only person on her team on parental leave, and she was cut. A manager was demoted five days after returning from medical leave.The tools have names. Metamate. Second-brain agents

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00:06:46

Episode 29: The Great Mutual Ghosting

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/08/11

The July jobs report was a classic 2026 special. The economy lost 23,000 jobs. The unemployment rate fell to 4.1 percent. That sounds like good news. It is not. The rate fell because 264,000 people left the labor force.Employers ignored 48 percent of applicants last year. Fifty-three percent of job seekers were ghosted. Forty percent got ghosted after a second or third interview. So job seekers started ghosting back. Seventy percent now say ghosting an employer is fair.The market has turned into a

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00:04:43

Friday Rant: The Cooling Numbers and the Quiet Rehires

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/08/07

July's layoff numbers dropped. 33,429 cuts — the lowest monthly total in two years. AI was still the top reason for five straight months. Tech remains the heaviest sector with 149,023 cuts this year.But here is the part the headlines are not telling you. Some companies are already walking it back. Ford rehired 350 engineers after AI quality systems failed. IBM is tripling entry-level hiring. Nearly one in three managers who cut for AI later rehired for the same work.The anticipation of what AI

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00:05:10

Episode 28: The War Runs on Talent We Don't Have

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/08/04

The Pentagon just launched War Force. AI and software engineers, forward-deployed, at up to $200,000 a year. Hundreds of roles. The goal: fill the gap left by 5,700 technical workers pushed out earlier this year.The government spent a year cutting technical staff to look lean. Then it built a premium program to hire them back. That is not a system failing. That is a system working as intended.Applications closed in July. Now the question: can any of these people actually get through a security

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00:07:11

Friday Rant: Honor, Interest, Fear

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/07/31

There is no rules-based international order. There never was. What we have is anarchy, held in check by the threat of force and the temporary alignment of interests. This week just made it harder to pretend otherwise.Iran launched missiles at US forces in Jordan. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia struck back in Iraq. Ukraine hit vessels in the Caspian Sea. Two wars that were supposed to be separate are now feeding each other.When someone loses a job to an automated screener, we call it a broken system. When

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00:07:00

Episode 27: The Selective Cuts

Moonshot Minute ·

2026/07/27

Alphabet spent $205 billion on AI infrastructure. Tesla burned cash on the same future. Patreon cut 20% of its workforce. Jobless claims hit a 60-year low while 720,000 people vanished from the labor force.Companies that cite AI as a layoff reason have underperformed the Nasdaq by 10%. The market is punishing the narrative. The workers are still paying the price.#MoonshotMinute #AILayoffs #Alphabet #Tesla #Patreon #Fed #TheUncounted

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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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