Meta Spent $14.3 Billion and Came in Fourth. Goldman Says 16,000 Jobs Gone Every Month. Your Commission Is a Lie.

The Machine

Meta just spent $14.3 billion. Not million. Billion. They brought in Alexander Wang from Scale AI to rebuild their entire artificial intelligence stack from the ground up. Nine months of work. Thousands of engineers. And they came out on the other side in fourth place. Behind Google. Behind OpenAI. Behind Anthropic.

Four companies are spending more money than most countries generate in a year trying to beat each other in a game that changes every six months. Nobody on CNBC is telling you this. While Zuckerberg burns through $135 billion a year in AI spending, we are sitting here building an entire daily show, running businesses, deploying voice agents for local companies. All of it for a lot less. Same underlying technology. Different zip code.

The revolution is not happening in their boardroom. It is happening in our kitchen. Zuckerberg spent more on one AI model than most towns would generate in a lifetime. We deploy the same caliber of intelligence for local businesses at $297 a month. A voice agent for a plumber last Tuesday answered every single call he missed over the weekend. While he was living his life. $14.3 billion and a guy in his home office in Santa Clarita with a laptop is outperforming them with the one metric that actually matters. Did it help a real person today?

Goldman Sachs dropped numbers this week that should keep you up tonight. AI is eliminating 25,000 jobs per month. Creating 9,000 back. Net loss: 16,000 jobs gone every single month. And it is hitting the youngest workers hardest. Companies lay off workers and attribute it to AI. Their stock valuations climb because investors love efficiency. Data entry. Customer service. Legal support. Building management. Gone.

The destruction arrives now. This month. The new jobs being created? Those take years to show up. Goldman's own data shows that workers displaced by technology earn 10% less for a full decade after losing their position. This is not a speed bump. This is a crater in somebody's life. The same CEOs laying off 16,000 people a month are doing keynote speeches about empowering the workforce with AI. Marc Benioff said Salesforce will not hire any more engineers, customer service agents, or lawyers because of AI tools. Then he goes on stage and talks about the future of work. Whose future? Not the 22-year-old student with debt who just got told her data entry position was automated. She is not at that conference. She is on Indeed at 11pm trying to figure out what happened to her career before it even started.

That is who we build for. That is who this show is for. The person who picks up the tool is the person who stays employed. The person who ignores it is the person the tool replaces.

Back in February, Anthropic released a set of plugins. Not a new model. Not some revolutionary breakthrough. Structured instructions for contract review, legal triage, compliance checks. Prompts. Workflow configurations. That is it. Thomson Reuters dropped 16%. LegalZoom dropped 20%. $285 billion in market value erased in a single trading day. Wall Street called it the SaaSocalypse.

The same platform that caused a quarter-trillion dollar selloff is the platform we use right here. And when we deploy for a plumber, a dentist, or an HVAC company here in Santa Clarita, they are operating with the same firepower that made Wall Street panic. The wealthy panic because AI threatened their margins. Welcome to the club. Now imagine instead of panicking, you picked up the tool and used it. That is what we do here. That is what we help businesses do every single day at HonorElevate.com.

The Body

A study came out this year in the Milbank Quarterly that confirmed what we have been saying on this show. Ultra-processed foods and cigarettes use the identical industry playbook. Same sensory additives. Same reward acceleration strategy. Same lobbying playbook. Same health washing claims. The researchers called them highly-engineered delivery systems designed specifically to maximize biological and psychological reinforcement.

They have a name for it. The bliss point. The exact combination of sugar, salt, and fat that spikes your dopamine, crashes it, and makes you reach for more. They change the shape of fat globules to improve how food feels in your mouth. They grind salt finer so the flavor hits your taste buds faster. They literally call that an improved flavor burst. This is not food. This is a drug with a nutrition label.

Why will health insurance not cover food addiction treatment? Because the money flows the other direction. The food industry creates the addicts. The pharmaceutical industry sells them the pills. The insurance industry charges them higher premiums. And the diet industry sells them the same failed solution every January for $49.99 a month. Everybody is getting paid except you. You are the product. You are the recurring revenue. They do not want you healthy. A healthy person is a lost customer.

317 pounds. That was where I stood. Hiding a bag of fast food under my front seat. Nobody in that supply chain wanted me to stop eating. Every single one of them wanted me to feel bad enough to buy their solution and desperate enough to fail so I would buy it again. And then it is my fault. That is not healthcare. That is a subscription trap wearing a lab coat.

When you stop eating, your body flips a switch. It is called autophagy. Your cells literally start eating their own damaged parts. Recycling broken proteins. Cleaning house. An enzyme called mTOR shuts down. Growth mode stops. Repair mode starts. A study on intermittent fasting showed autophagy gene expression jumped 4.2 times in just four weeks. Your body already knows how to fix itself. It has been trying to help you for years. We have been told our whole lives to eat six small meals a day. Snack between meals. Never skip breakfast. Every single one of those instructions keeps your body in growth mode and prevents the repair cycle from even starting. Follow the money. More at TheLastAddiction.com.

The House

Why does it cost more to sell a million dollar home than a $300,000 home? The work is identical. Same photography. Same staging. Same MLS entry. Same open houses. Same negotiation. Same phone calls. So why does commission scale with price? Because the industry set it up that way. And nobody questions it because the people who benefit from it are the ones you are asking.

California 30-year fixed mortgage rate hit 6.37% yesterday. Down from 6.62% a year ago. The California Association of Realtors projects 270,400 sales statewide with a median of $905,000. Rates are moving in the right direction. Buyers are coming back. Active listings have climbed for 23 consecutive months.

If you are thinking about selling in Santa Clarita or anywhere in the valley, this is the window. But here is what we hear every single week. "My agent said the higher commission motivates them to work harder." Really? Your agent just told you that their effort is directly tied to how much they get paid on a particular deal. That is not motivation. That is a confession. They just admitted that they will not give you their best unless the check is big enough.

Every client gets the same effort because they pay the same fee. $300,000 house. $17,000. $3 million house. $17,000. Same energy. Same obsession with getting you the highest price in the shortest time and getting you the best terms possible. You should not have to pay more to get your agent's full attention. That should be the baseline. But this industry has been running on a broken model for so long that people defend it like it is gravity. It is not gravity. It is tradition. And tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.

Sellers only. Fixed fee. 100% of my energy, one thing. 27 years in this valley. Not a pitch. Just what we do. Visit SellersOnlyAgent.com.

80% of California homeowners are sitting on a mortgage rate below 5% right now. New buyers are staring at 6.37%. The gap froze this market for two solid years. But life does not wait for interest rates. Divorces happen. Jobs change. Families grow. Parents downsize. 23 straight months of inventory growth tell you the freeze is cracking. And in a normalizing market, the agent you choose matters more, not less. When buyers have options, when inventory is not scarce, your listing strategy is the difference between selling in 30 days or sitting for six months.

The Anchor

Everything we talked about today. AI models that cost $14 billion. Food engineered in labs to keep you addicted. An industry that charges you more to sell your home because they can. Every single one of those systems was designed by people chasing a lowercase g. Money. Power. Market share. Click-through rate.

An uppercase G does not promise you it will avoid the storm. It promises you that you will not face it alone. Twenty years as a cop. The worst people can do to each other. Doors at three in the morning that nobody should have ever had to knock on. And through all of it, the one thing that kept me from becoming the cynical, burnt-out, angry version of myself that this world tries to turn you into. One simple thing. Gratitude.

Not for the good stuff. For the bad stuff. For the hard calls. For the days I wanted to quit. For the fat I was carrying and the fat I continue to carry right now. For the businesses that failed before the ones that worked. Because those were the days that built me. If all you are grateful for is the wins, you have not learned anything yet. The losses are the curriculum. The wins are just the diploma.

Whether your anchor is Jesus, like mine, or something else you hold on to when everything gets loud. Find it today and hold on to it. Because the noise out there is only getting louder. And the people selling the noise do not care if you make it through.

AI for everyone. Not just the wealthy. Recovery for everyone. Not just the ones who can afford a clinic. Fair pricing for everyone. Not just the ones who know how to negotiate. That is the mission. And that is why we show up.

ConnorWithHonor.com