Briggs Kellogg

108,000 People Lost Their Jobs Last Month. I Wasn't One of Them.

"The people who survive aren't the ones who picked the right industry. They're the ones who are useful to the people standing next to them."

If you asked me what my favorite hobby is, I'd say putting on noise canceling headphones with some music, laying in my LoveSac, bundled in a blanket, and my head on a pillow as I read articles and watch videos for the sake of learning. This is done best with one of my children or my wife cuddled next to me on the LoveSac.

But, I was alone last night when I read, "US employers cut 108,000 jobs in January—worst start to a year since the Great Recession."

I read it twice. Put the phone down. Picked it

I Sell AI for a Living. I Think About Dune a Lot.

"The Butlerian Jihad wasn't anti-technology. It was anti-atrophy."

I caught myself the other day. I had a problem—not a complicated one, just something I needed to think through—and before I'd spent even thirty seconds with it, I'd already opened Claude. I was reaching for AI the way you reach for your phone when you're bored. Automatically. Without deciding to.

That scared me.

I work at ElevenLabs. We make anything and everything AI audio. And we're good at it. I spend my days helping enterprise customers figure out how to use our technology. I believe in this technology—genuinely, not just professionally.

But lately I've been worried

The Job Market Isn't Fair. I'm Sorry.

"I’m part of this class now. I didn’t storm the gates. I learned the passwords."

I want to say something that might cost me some social capital, but I think it needs to be said by someone on the inside.

The job market isn’t fair. And I don’t mean that in the way we usually say it—the platitude that lets us shrug and move on. I mean it structurally. Architecturally. By design, even when no one intended the design.

I’m sorry. Not in the way that absolves me. In the way that sits with it.

I’m inside. Not rich. Not powerful. But protected.

I know how to sound in the

I Clone Voices. I'm Optimistic.

"We do what AI does. We are symbolic systems calling tools."

I work at an AI company, and most of my colleagues don't talk about how these systems actually work. Not really. We know the rulebook—the prompts that behave, the edge cases that break, the workarounds that ship. But why those edges exist? That's deeper than most of us go. We're fluent in the grammar without understanding the tongue.

Here's what I've come to understand: AI is a toddler learning in reverse.

It started as an academic superhuman. It read everything. It can summarize legal briefs, generate sonnets, explain quantum mechanics to a fifth grader. And then you ask it

Slack Was Drowning Me, I Built a Podcast

"Here's what I've learned: internal tools die in a very specific way."

The message wasn't from my lead. It was from someone in engineering I'd never spoken to.

Three words. Posted in a public channel at 7:43 AM on a Tuesday.

"I listen daily."

I stared at it longer than I should have. I don't remember what I said back. Something casual, probably. Something that hid the fact that I'd been refreshing Slack to see if there were any new reactions or comments more times that month than I will ever admit out loud.

Here's what happened: I was drowning.

Too many Slack channels. Too much context scattered everywhere. I kept

I Cried at Work. I Was Also Right.

"Then he stopped me. 'You don't agree with a fact,' he said. 'You understand a fact.' In front of everyone."

Several years ago, I was an employee at a company during a turbulent stretch—both for them and for me. The economy was uncertain, my family situation demanded stability, and I'd taken a leap of faith on a role that had plenty of reasons to say no to.

During the interview process, they told me directly: "Are you fine with being yelled at here? Insulted personally? If not, this might not be the right place for you. You have to be tough—even if you're screamed at not only for unmet expectations, but for things about you personally."

I said

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