The Job Sh*t Show

Josh Levine
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Work is broken. How we find jobs, how we lead teams, how we decide who’s valuable and why. The Job Sh*t Show is an investigation into what’s actually happening and why the people who run old playbooks keep losing. I’m Josh Levine, the host of this sh*t show. I’ve spent nearly two decades working with leaders and teams navigating growth, change, and the gaps between companies, work, and people. Every week I ask one question about something happening at the intersection of AI and work—sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes just plain weird. If you’ve hired someone, been hired, managed people, or watched the system fail, you’re part of this story.

  1. Aug 27

    Are We Using AI to Do the Wrong Things Faster?

    Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months and still can't tie the spend to results. Starbucks pulled its AI inventory agent. Ford hired back 350 engineers to clean up after automated inspection. So what's actually going on? I think most of us are stuck in mode one and mode two thinking — using AI to automate tasks or do things faster ourselves — when the real payoff is in mode three: changing what work is worth doing at all. I walk through the steam-engine-to-electric-motor shift, the productivity J-curve, and two examples that show what mode three looks like in practice: IKEA turning 8,500 call center workers into a $1.25B design consulting business, and DeepMind's AlphaFold going from 200,000 human-predicted protein structures to 200 million. Also — quick heads up. This is the last Job Shit Show episode you'll catch here on Spotify/Apple. We're folding it into Great Mondays going forward, so you can still catch it there, plus we'll keep posting video on Substack. And if mode three thinking is something you want to work through with me directly, I'm hosting a workshop called AI Together on September 9th. Sign up at aitogether.greatmondays.com. About The Job Sh*t Show The Job Sh*t Show is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.

    Are We Using AI to Do the Wrong Things Faster?

  2. Aug 20

    We need to talk about professional services.

    My friend Lindsey Caplan buys professional services. She also sells them. Recently she opened a deliverable from someone she's paying real money, and found AI output staring back at her. What she landed on is something I keep coming back to. We've confused what we actually pay professional services people for. It was never really the output, even if it looked that way for years. It's the judgment, the pattern matching, the thing someone builds by doing this work long enough to see what you can't. I said something similar in a recent interview. Domain expertise is the new oil. Information is everywhere now. Knowledge is a utility. What's rare is someone who has seen enough of the pattern to tell you what it means. The disclosure question is where it got messy for us, and I've been here before. Five years ago it was whether your web guy only builds on WordPress. Now it's whether the person you hired is quietly routing your project through AI without telling you. Lindsey's take isn't that AI is the problem. It's that nobody's saying up front where they're using it and where they're not, and that silence is what kills the trust. Here's where I landed by the end of the conversation: AI was never built to help you do less work. It's not a shortcut, and treating it like one is exactly what's breaking down in the industries where time was always the product being sold. About The Job Sh*t Show The Job Sh*t Show is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.

    We need to talk about professional services.

  3. Aug 13

    Episode Revist: If Everyone Hates LinkedIn, Why Are We Still There? The Role of Platforms In Our Search for Jobs

    LinkedIn is noisy, frustrating, and often feels like a job search dead end—so why are we still using it? In this episode, Josh unpacks the tension we all feel about the platform, exploring what still works (profiles, networks, discovery) and what definitely doesn’t (spam, false leads, and the chaos of too much noise). Plus, a glimpse into how job seekers are starting to reclaim control—one Slack or Discord community at a time. About The Job Sh*t Show The Job Sh*t Show is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.

    Episode Revist: If Everyone Hates LinkedIn, Why Are We Still There? The Role of Platforms In Our Search for Jobs

  4. Aug 6

    Am I a Crappy Boss to my AI?

    Managing an AI agent is like speed running my worst management habits. I get frustrated, I start micromanaging, and I catch myself acting like the boss I used to complain about. Boris Berenberg, founder of Zero AI, told me we're turning everyone into a manager now. There's no such thing as a non managerial role anymore. Jack Dorsey disagrees. He called middle managers "an information routing protocol," cut 4,000 jobs at Block, and said he wants all 6,000 employees reporting straight to him. If a manager is just a router, sure, a computer can replace that. But that's the part of the job that sucks anyway. Here's the part that doesn't. Gallup says managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement. Google's own research found coaching was the top trait of their best managers, and technical skill was dead last. We just never train for it. There's also a hard cap. One person can really know maybe eight people well. That's why good teams stay small. It's slow. It's also the whole job. So middle management might be the last job that still requires you to give a shit. Now that we're all about to manage a team of bots, the question is whether we show up as a coach or a router. About The Job Sh*t Show The Job Sh*t Show is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.

    Am I a Crappy Boss to my AI?

  5. Jul 30

    Is AI the Light Bulb or the Loom?

    Josh's instinct is always to reach for a matching disaster from history. He thinks that's a trap, because by the time you pick the analogy, you've already picked the answer. He found the proof in a New York Times episode his wife sent him. The chief economics correspondent Ben Casselman laid out two futures for AI. One matched the internet, which displaced travel agents slowly enough that most just aged out. The other matched the China shock, which flattened entire manufacturing towns overnight. Josh traced where these comparisons actually come from. Mary Daly at the San Francisco Fed reaches for electricity, because for a central banker the moral has to be patience. Journalist Brian Merchant reaches for the Luddites, because the real history is nine years of factory workers petitioning Parliament before anyone smashed a loom. Neither side is lying. They're just telling you what they think their job is by which wreck they pick. Josh built a timeline of these disruptions for a talk in Seattle and checked every date against a source. Three of the most repeated stories turned out to be folklore. He kept them in anyway, labeled, because a myth people keep reaching for still tells you something true about what they're scared of. Follow The Job Sh*t Show investigation at https://joshlevine.substack.com About The Job Sh*t Show The Job Sh*t Show is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.

    Is AI the Light Bulb or the Loom?

  6. Jul 23

    Are We Using AI Backwards? An Improv Coach Says We’re Doing It Wrong. (Substack preview)

    The instinct is always the same. Ask AI to complete the task, assemble the deck, execute the command. Josh thinks that's backwards, and the bill for that mindset is already coming due. So Josh went looking for a different way to use the tool, one built on opening ideas up instead of closing them down. He found it in leadership coach and improviser Aidan Nepon. She once coached a singing student without a single technical note, just told her to sing like Beyoncé. The persona did more work than any correction could, and it's the same principle Josh thinks we're missing with AI. Josh breaks down three improv games Aidan uses with clients, and turns each into a way of prompting AI that pushes past the obvious answer. The real question was never how to get AI to finish your thought. It's how to get it to argue with you instead. Follow The Job Sh*t Show investigation at https://joshlevine.substack.com About The Job Sh*t Show The Job Sh*t Show is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.

    Are We Using AI Backwards? An Improv Coach Says We’re Doing It Wrong. (Substack preview)

  7. Jul 9

    Will We Ever Stop Work-Maxxing? The False Promise of Infinite Productivity

    In this episode, Josh challenges the question everyone keeps asking about AI and work, and makes the case that it's the wrong one. The framing is always the same. AI helps us do more, or it burns us out. Faster or exhausted. Pick one. But that's a biology problem, not a software problem. Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index shows the split. Eighty percent of the workforce says they don't have the time or energy for the work already on their plate. One fractional executive on a call put it plainest. "I'm 53 and I am tired." Josh's grandfather used to joke that owning a business meant working any 24 hours you wanted. Josh built a bot this year to book his own podcast guests. It's faster. He's not any less tired. The question was never how to work faster. It's what happens when a species that needs sleep gets asked to keep pace with something that doesn't. Josh shares where he's drawing his own line between speed and rest. Follow The Job Sh*t Show investigation at https://joshlevine.substack.com About The Job Sh*t Show The Job Sh*t Show is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.

    Will We Ever Stop Work-Maxxing? The False Promise of Infinite Productivity

  8. Jul 2

    Should AI Be Allowed In School? We’re asking the wrong question. (Substack preview)

    In this episode, Josh challenges the question everyone keeps asking about AI in school — and makes the case that it's exactly the wrong one to be asking. The yes-no binary is a dead end. AI in school: allowed or banned. AI in writing: authentic or cheating. These are crude frames for a genuinely complicated problem. And the institutions drawing the hardest lines — the grad school deans, the publishers who pulled Mia Ballard's horror novel Shy Girl over AI accusations her author denied — aren't protecting learning. They're avoiding the harder conversation about where the guardrails actually belong. Anne figured out her own. Research, yes. Writing, no. Checking a paper for errors, yes. She named her AI Otis. And by semester two, she'd built a working relationship with it that her distributed, at-times-lackluster teachers couldn't come close to matching. The question was never should AI be allowed. It's where do we install the guardrails — and who gets to decide. Josh shares a framework for developing your own boundaries around AI use, for yourself and your team. The full essay and the framework are on The Sh*t List at https://joshlevine.substack.com About The Job Sh*t Show The Job Sh*t Show is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.

    Should AI Be Allowed In School? We’re asking the wrong question. (Substack preview)
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Ratings & Reviews

3
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Work is broken. How we find jobs, how we lead teams, how we decide who’s valuable and why. The Job Sh*t Show is an investigation into what’s actually happening and why the people who run old playbooks keep losing. I’m Josh Levine, the host of this sh*t show. I’ve spent nearly two decades working with leaders and teams navigating growth, change, and the gaps between companies, work, and people. Every week I ask one question about something happening at the intersection of AI and work—sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes just plain weird. If you’ve hired someone, been hired, managed people, or watched the system fail, you’re part of this story.

Information

  • Creator
    Josh Levine
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    33
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Josh Levine
  • Show Website
    The Job Sh*t Show

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