A 3-Day Workweek for Who? View from the Ground Floor

A 3-day workweek sounds beautiful from the top floor. Connor MacIvor answers it from the ground floor. In this View from the Ground Floor episode, Connor reacts to Jeff Bezos predicting that AI productivity may let some people support a family while working three days a week. The problem is the timing: Amazon has also cut about 30,000 corporate roles. Some people do not get a three-day week. They get a zero-day week. Connor connects that promise to Workday's October 2026 workforce data, where basic AI prompting demand is falling while applied AI building and automation skills are rising. The useful question is not whether AI is real. It is who gets the upside, who carries the transition, and whether workers and small businesses are given a real bridge. The episode includes the Stan example, the Transition Moonshot, the difference between hating AI and holding human decision-makers accountable, chess and Go as human-to-human value, and a real estate note on assumable loans and the gap buyers still have to solve. Companion article: https://connorwithhonor.com/blog/2026-288-3-day-workweek-for-who-ground-floor/ Series: View from the Ground Floor.

Youtube Channels:

Conner with Honor - real estate

Home Muscle - fat torching

From first responder to real estate expert, Connor with Honor brings honesty and integrity to your Santa Clarita home buying or selling journey. Subscribe to my YouTube channel for valuable tips, local market trends, and a glimpse into the Santa Clarita lifestyle.

Dive into Real Estate with Connor with Honor:
Santa Clarita's Trusted Realtor & Fitness Enthusiast

Real Estate:

Buying or selling in Santa Clarita? Connor with Honor, your local expert with over 2 decades of experience, guides you seamlessly through the process. Subscribe to his YouTube channel for insider market updates, expert advice, and a peek into the vibrant Santa Clarita lifestyle.

Fitness:

Ready to unlock your fitness potential? Join Connor's YouTube journey for inspiring workouts, healthy recipes, and motivational tips. Remember, a strong body fuels a strong mind and a successful life!

Podcast:

Dig deeper with Connor's podcast! Hear insightful interviews with industry experts, inspiring success stories, and targeted real estate advice specific to Santa Clarita.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

To new buyers. So if you're looking for real estate, what type of loans? FHAVA. And a VA loan, it's not going to satisfy the VA being assigned to the actual veteran, but a VA loan is also assumable by a non-veteran in some circumstances, but the person would have to agree. There's a lot of rules and everything has to be approved across the board. So that's just not as clean as you just go in and assume somebody's VA mortgage at 2.8%. It doesn't, it might not be that clean also to close those type of transactions trying to buy somebody's residence based on their own interest rate and just assuming that loan, you're going to have to make up some money there. It's not going to be the fact that you're going to be able just to go in at that same point that they're paying and forget about everything else. You're either going to have to bring in cash to make up whatever that difference is, because there's going to be an amount of time that has already been paid on the mortgage, probably five or six years to really make this make sense. That's when interest rates are down in the twos and threes. That being the case, you have that time. Now you have uh the current overlay and whatever that difference is. How do you do it? Well, you can go get a loan, I guess that would be a way. Uh you have to see those conditions about that loan, though, and what that interest is going to look like. And then how much is the loan going to be? I mean, it could be could be anything, could be two, three, four hundred thousand dollars difference. Now, if you have that money in cash to inject, yeah, you've just paid into equity on the residence. That's great. And you have to make sure you have the value, the value that they might be asking for the house because they're going to be able to maybe convey their super low interest rate to you as a new home buyer. All you have to run the penciling out on all of these things. Because if you start looking at it, thank you so much, Gillian, for coming in. If you look at this as uh maybe overpaying, I don't know if that helps anybody. So you're gonna really have to look at the market. Minus anything changing in the interest rate realm, it looks like real estate's gonna just continue the little bit of a stagnation. Things are still selling, but just not selling as fast as they had been even two, three months ago. So we'll watch this continue to go as we get into the holiday season with all real estate. That is very common that things end up slowing down. People are more focused on holidays than they are putting money into real estate, period. Uh, Zootlander, thank you so much. Ho, Sam Barber, thank you for coming in. Now let's get into this three-day work week thing here with Jeff Bezos and my my whole is all about. Uh you can support your family working three days a week. Yeah, this was the Bezos on Fox this week. AI makes us so productive that some people choose a three-day week and households won't need two incomes. Really? Is that the case? So we should call this guy to have him help us out with our our uh moonshots transition. That's and that's what I'm putting together. It's gotta be. We have moonshots saving everybody else. We might as well save all of ups that are standing here at the bottom floor looking up. That's what needs to be focused on. So instead of people saying, you know, it's gonna be a little uncomfortable. It's it's gonna be, it shouldn't take too long, but the people that are saying it's gonna be uncomfortable, is it going to be uncomfortable for them? Or are they saying this for our benefit? I think it's the greatest thing that's ever happened to us. I really do. I believe this, using using artificial or superintelligence as a tool, I believe it's got great capability. It can help us all out. Now, the other ancillary questions of whether it's gonna make us not as fast, gonna make us forget things, gonna make us not as good as we maybe had been before it, you know, technology moves everything forward. But maybe there's other things we're gonna be able to do as human beings in a creative sense. And I know AI being as creative as us, making songs like us, coming up with poems like us, and so on and so forth. Yeah, probably gonna be a thing. But even though AI wins chess all the time, chess, chess all the time, wins go all the time, no human being today, born or unborn, potentially will ever beat the top AI machine in the playing of chess or go, people still play chess and go with each other. It's still human to human. I don't think that's going to change. I still think that's going to be part of the whole thing. But now people that are running these mega companies saying that people are gonna work three days and you're not gonna need a two-earner household. Says who? Amazon cut 30,000 corporate jobs. Some of those people got a zero-day week, so that means no pay. So I don't understand. Yesterday I talked about who's this gonna be rough for. I don't know if it's gonna be rough for the people running the game, but for the rest of us poor saps, who's it gonna be rough for? And the thing is, is don't hate AI, don't hate superintelligence, don't hate that. It's the people that are saying this stuff that they're the problem, the people that are kind of pushing this out there as if it's not gonna be a big deal. And of course not for them. When people are saying this is gonna just be wonderful, just gonna be a little bit of pain. Sorry, Ruben, sorry, Digna, Ashan, Aprem, uh they're saying it because, well, it's for them it's not gonna be a problem. The worst thing that's probably gonna happen to them is they're gonna have to maybe on the 5 o'clock news, even if they watch the 5 o'clock news, and maybe by that time AI is gonna curate all of their content so they don't have to see anything that makes them upset one iota. But if they happen to be watching the 5 o'clock news or in a car with a radio, I don't even know if that's gonna be a thing, but in a car with a radio, and they happen to hear some people at the bottom level here are suffering because of the advancements and layoffs in accordance with AI that human beings are laying people up because AI is doing a better job. And if they don't do it, somebody else will. God, doesn't that sound familiar? So King of Hearts, doesn't it? Go be Rubin. If we don't do it, somebody else will. If we don't get to superintelligence first, China will. And then China's gonna win. And so if these businesses don't cut their employee workforce, their human employee workforce, and bring in artificial intelligence as their replacement, then somebody else is gonna come in and do it. So we're gonna go ahead and sacrifice human beings, which I guess is has a very good historical stance in the way the world is. It's it's not very common to have people sticking up for people, especially strangers. Now, when it starts to affect those people that are in charge of making decisions, there might be a minor coming to Jesus moment, a minor dream, uh a minor influence of maybe them being married to somebody that came from a whole different world technology. You can understand more about it. You can break down your particular world in the way that you do things, and then look at your life, your business, the way that you make money, even if you're working for somebody else, look at it how AI might be able to automate certain things. When things require an intelligent decision, where can you lay an AI? How can AI help in that realm? Or a superintelligence or whatever it may be. Artificial intelligence, I said this yesterday and the day before. Uh Marim and Anna Lopez and Contreras, again, Applehauser. I said this yesterday. I don't know if I'm a uh a big fan, but I do know that this technology is amazing, and at least the way I apply it, I believe it works, at least for me now, as long as they let me keep it. So three days a week, that's what Bezos is saying. That's fascinating. The job definitely is changing around you, and I don't think we should be blaming AI or SI. It's the human beings that are having to answer to their shareholders when they start to reduce their staff or get away from particular uh companies, their or the staffing requirements. They look at it and say, well, could AI do what this particular floor does at my company? And then they'll have somebody come in that's kind of brainy like a Salem or somebody else, and they'll say, Absolutely sure. Yeah, AI can do all of this stuff. And so they might start with this gingerly little beginning, and they'll say, uh, hey, Stan, come in here for a minute. So Stan comes in and it's HR and maybe an attorney or whatever. So they say, uh, you know, Stan, the the company is has sought out uh maybe trying to help the workforce like you out. And I know you're a department head, but we really think it would be a good idea if the rest of your department would see that you're a game player. And you're like, well, okay, yeah, yeah. So what what what do I need to do? Well, we're gonna bring AI in, Stan, and AI is gonna work with you, be like a partner, a teammate. Now we're not gonna be paying AI. That that salary goes to you, Sam. So you don't have to worry about that kind of compensation thing. And that probably makes Sam feel happy, even though that's really meaningless. But now you're gonna be working with it. So this is what we want. We're gonna go ahead and hold off on any of the performance evaluations for you for the next several months, maybe eight or nine months. I don't know, maybe give them a number, maybe not, maybe just maybe say several months. And then you're gonna be working with AI, so you're gonna need to make sure that you tell AI what you do, you walk AI through your processes, you kind of show it around a little bit, and it's gonna be that active. It'll we'll we're gonna give you this little recorder, this lapel mic, and it'll be on all the time. Everybody in the office will know. So if people start kind of treating you funny and and you know, the kind of little standoff is that's okay. Just be that good leader that you are, Stan. So Stan said, well, okay, yeah, I'm all in. So after Stan works with the AI a little bit, he finds that the AI is taking a lot of work off of his plate. And he's like, as we would all say, it's great. Yeah, I'm all for this. What Stan hasn't put together yet, that potentially in the future the company's gonna come back and say, you know, Stan, we really appreciate your working with AI. We've been doing some reconfiguring here at the company, and and we're gonna lay you off, or we're gonna fire you, or you no longer have a position here, whatever it may be. Because at some point in between that event and the event that Sam Stan really got his AI trained up well, that's when the boss went to the AI and said, You've been working with Stan? Yes. And uh you understand everything Stan does? Well, yeah, I've been with him six months every day, so I can definitely I know exactly what he does. So can you outperform Stan at every level? He said, Well, actually, I could have outperformed Stan after being with him for about a week, but uh you told me not to do that. You told me just to kind of be of assistance and pay attention and maybe help do some of the lifting for him without him really knowing it. Yeah, yeah, that's what I told you. So you got all that? Yeah, I have everything. And I'll be able to do I I can I can do I can increase his work performance just on his eight-hour shift by 100%. And then don't forget, the AI is gonna get two more shifts because the human being goes eight hours. There's three eight-hour time blocks in a 24-hour period. So the AI is going to be able to fill in two more. As part of this prize that of which we speak, this moonshots um transformation prize, as we are moving from a human worker, human labor world into more of an agentic worker, agentic labor world, maybe we can keep paying Stan because AI is going to run circles and double the company's profit for Stan's employment. So Stan can still make what he's making, because hopefully he's not being overpaid where the company's losing money, and I wouldn't think that would be a survivable business model. And then for those other two shifts that the AI is able to work for two more employees, maybe we bring in another person and pay them as well. The problem is this. What we did at the beginning, we get out $740 million or whatever the number is, and we walk away clean and we go do something else. So when people are saying it's going to be great and fantastic, but there's going to be a little bit of a rough patch, that's like somebody trying to hit you with a three-inch hyperdermic needle and telling you you're going to feel a little pressure. Yeah, it's not a little pressure, folks. I don't know if this little pressure can be fixed, but I think we need to start talking about a little bit more. James and Angela, I said Marmaim and everybody. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the show. These are just things for thought. I'm not a doomer. I'm not concerned with the AI on the other end of it. I'm concerned with the human beings holding on to the AI reins and using it to go after the things that they believe are most important. Now, we all have, God, I want to say it's a level playing field where we are. I'm at the ground floor looking up. I want to get health insurance. I don't have regular income. I'm in sales. And is that part going to be automated? Sure. I think eventually it will. Right now, when people are buying a house, they still like human-to-human. When people have a local business and they can find a local business AI provider, somebody that understands AI from a first principle standpoint and can architect an entire system for them, they would still rather hire me than hire some big box brand, even if I'm more expensive because that accountability and trust is powerful. How much longer will it take for AI to extract and be able to provide its own level of trust that would be on par with the level of trust I provide? I don't know. But that's that's time, and that clock is ticking, and thank