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Your job isn’t being automated. It’s being repriced. Plus: 13,000 EU regulations and where the builders went.

They count 87,714 US job cuts tied to AI so far in 2026.

For all of last year, the number was 54,836.

The year before that, 12,742.

Tech alone has announced 139,156 layoffs through June, up 83 percent from the same point in 2025.

This is what the data is saying. Whether it’s true or not, time will tell, but from using these tools aggressively myself and from having recently cut someone on my team, one thing’s for sure: employees that are not using these tools, that are not embracing this new way of work, are gonna be first up on the list. That’s for sure.

Whether companies are actually firing people because AI is getting so good at doing their work, it’s really hard to say, because at this point the agents, the workflows themselves, and the work have to be checked. It has to be managed, and it has to be initiated, and you need humans to do that. I don’t know if that’s gonna change anytime soon, but it still comes back to the same thing.

If you want job security, you learn how to do this yourself, and then you can actually get more effective, better, and become more valuable to the company as AI improves right alongside you.

Another thing for Europe to regulate

The story for the EU is that the EU is doing what it’s done to make life there perpetually worse with each passing year: more regulation, more state control. Now with AI, they will push innovation out to other countries. Smart. Real smart.

Here are the numbers.

Between 2019 and 2024 the EU issued more than 13,000 new regulations. The United States issued about 5,500 over the same stretch. That is 2.4 times the rulemaking volume, aimed at an economy that is growing more slowly.

From 2013 to 2024, private AI funding in the United States totaled 471 billion dollars, more than the rest of the world combined. China came second at 119 billion. The UK third at 28 billion. No EU member state is anywhere near the top of that list.

Close to 30 percent of the unicorns founded in Europe between 2008 and 2021 moved their headquarters abroad, and the overwhelming majority moved to the United States. Recent AWS research found four in ten European startups would consider leaving Europe entirely in order to scale.

Mario Draghi, a former head of the European Central Bank, wrote the EU’s own competitiveness report and called this an existential challenge. He named regulatory burden as a driver. The people running the place have been told, on paper, by one of their own.

The response came last Thursday. Ten billion euros, about 11.4 billion dollars, of public money for seven AI gigafactories, with the Commission hoping it pulls in another 20 billion euros of private capital. For scale, Amazon alone raised its AI spending plan to 220 billion dollars this year.

And on August 2, the AI Act’s transparency rules and its full market surveillance apparatus went live, which means anything generating synthetic audio, image, video, or text now carries a disclosure duty and a regulator with direct enforcement powers sitting behind it.

You cannot regulate your way to a frontier lab. Capital and builders go where they are wanted, and they have been voting with their feet for fifteen years.

This is the way.

-Colin
X-IG-TT

“Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas. In that order.”

Really good talk → and going to become the most important thing in the AI age

👀 Screens to your naked eyes…. 🍳📱

8+ hours of screens a day, and most people protect exactly none of it.

The LITEZ All-day 3 Lens system fixes that: it blocks up to 99% of the blue light hitting your eyes from sunup to bedtime.

Less eye strain, fewer headaches, easier sleep.

Yellow for daytime, orange and red for night. I rotate all three.

BH readers get 10% off with code BHNL.

📰 Links

🛠️ One Build — The Replacement Test

List every task you did last week. One row each, no filtering, no editorializing.
Add one column: could a competent stranger with your best AI model do this from a written brief? Yes or no.
Count the yeses. That percentage is how much of your week has already been repriced, whether anyone told you or not.
Now look at the no’s and ask why. Relationships? Taste? Context nobody ever wrote down? That is your actual moat, in writing, probably for the first time.
Every week, move one hour out of the yes pile and into the no pile. Automate the yes. Invest the hour in the no.

📊 Stats

Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened to 355 million dollars from 4,487 theaters, and the weekend hit 430 million dollars across all films, the biggest North American box office weekend ever recorded. Attention still concentrates. Source: Variety
China State Railway is now moving air conditioners from Chinese factories to European buyers in 15 days by rail, against 40 days by sea. Constraints move faster than plans. Source: Nikkei Asia
US fresh lettuce unit sales fell 8.7 percent year over year, roughly 7.6 million pounds, and 28 of 37 tracked vegetable categories fell with it. Source: The Wall Street Journal

🔥 Useful Sh!t Corner 🔥

🗓️ On this day in 1958 → the USS Nautilus became the first vessel to reach the North Pole, under the ice.
🦾 How to be dangerous → Write the brief before you open the tool. The tool was never the bottleneck.
🌞 Health → Get sunlight in your eyes within 30 minutes of waking. Costs nothing, sets the whole night’s sleep.
🍳 Cooking → Salt your meat the night before and leave it uncovered in the fridge. Dry brine beats wet every time.
💬 Quote → “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” —Alvin Toffler
🤖 AI reality check → Every agent you run still needs a human to start it, check it, and own the result. That is the job now.

🧰 Tools

🤖 While everyone’s watching tutorials, the winners are installing systems like this: My AI Agent Operating System → full memory, setup, and database needed to get an agent working for you in minutes. Get the basics down, then customize it for your exact work and life routine → Only $76 → Personal AI Agent System: A Work + Life OS

👓 Starting at screens for hours each day started giving me headaches and blurry vision at night. Blue light-induced eye strain was the culprit. And it’s why I now wear these daily: LITEZ Screen Glasses. BH readers get 10% off using code BHNL

🛠️ The tools I actually run my business on → My Apps Stack (click here)

🛍️ Fav Products

🪴 Better Human Goods → Nontoxic essentials for health and home. Products that work without the junk. Use code BNL for 10% off.

🛒 My favorite products, with subscriber discounts → My Favorite Products

👋 I’m Colin → Father, AI builder, founder, investor. X-IG-TT → Free Stuff

🧠 Become irreplaceable: Build Your Personal AI Moat. Get 50% off the year and support so I can keep dropping free stuff here and here.

Use AI. Stay Human. This is the way.

🦾 The Great Job Repricing