Your Work is Not Your Worth

One week the headlines say AI is coming for every job. A week later, the same leaders who predicted the apocalypse quietly call it off. Underneath the whiplash is a question almost nobody says out loud: if a machine can do what I do, what was I ever worth? In this episode, Keith Koo separates the signal from the noise on AI and work — the CEOs reversing themselves, and the cuts that are real (roughly 139,000 in tech this year, landing hardest on entry-level and late-career workers). Then he names the deeper issue: somewhere we fused what we do with what we're worth, and AI just held up the mirror. It's not abstract — researchers have found men's mortality spikes right at retirement age, when the work they'd anchored their identity to disappears. Keith goes back to the garden — work as calling and dignity, before the fall — to Jesus the carpenter, and to his own three decades in tech and finance, including an early-career illness that taught him output was never the point. The second half turns to the oldest version of the lie: measuring a person by output. Keith traces it from Pharaoh's system to the Great Wall of China — which, as his family told him growing up, was remembered as a symbol of oppression, the way the pyramids and other monuments built by the enslaved are, long before Mao's call that "every Chinese should visit" turned it into a point of national pride. God broke that system with a day of rest, and broke it eternally in the gospel: "you are his workmanship" — the poem, not the productivity. It lands on the parable the show is named for, and one question for your week. New episodes and comments at xtalents.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.