Do you know anyone looking for a job right now? Hundreds of applications. Maybe a dozen interviews. Call backs where they are asked to solve real work problems. And lots and lots of rejections. It’s brutal, because employers are no longer aligned with job seekers. The two groups are no longer both seeking the same outcome and there’s a bigger power differential than ever.
If you haven’t looked for a job recently or if you’ve been fortunate enough to find every job through personal connections, none of this may make sense to you, right? The employer needs to hire people, job seekers need a job. Employer advertises, seekers apply, employer struggles to sort through applicants, and then picks the applicant they like. Done!
Except what if the cost of taking on the wrong person is high enough that employers can wait? Or, what if employers aren’t really looking to fill positions at all and are just sampling the job market to determine the going rate? And what if employers have AI to sort through applications for them, so they can survey an unlimited number of applicants?
Now that jobs attract huge numbers of applicants – even for non-remote jobs (Imagine you live in Boston, but a really cool job in Austin opens. You likely won’t move, but the cost of applying is close to zero, so why not find out?) – employers have to use AI to sort through systems. That used to work to some degree, but now job applicants can also use AI to search and craft resumes. No matter your skill set, no matter how great you are, there are so many applicants that you’re just a number among thousands of applicants.
Supercharged application numbers have created a crazy secondary effect: If employer HR departments can just sort through an unlimited number of applications at any time, they might as well advertise jobs that don’t exist to survey the market of applicants. With applicants to fake jobs, employers can learn what kinds of salaries applicants want, what sort of skill sets are typical, how willing people might be to move to get a job. Then, with this information, pressure their existing employees to conform – or use it to manage the next wave of layoffs.
The combination of online job boards and AI has created an asymmetry in the employment market between employers and job seekers. And the moment you start looking for a job, you experience the crushing reality. In asymmetric situations like this, one side’s success is not dependent on how the other behaves because the two groups are seeking outcomes irrelevant to the other’s participation.
Therefore, as a job seeker, in order to succeed, you need to find a way to redefine success so that it does not depend on applying to specific jobs offered by specific employers. You have to create your own asymmetry so that your success is not dependent on pre-determined paths.
After decades of technological acceleration, the speed and flexibility of information and capital flows, accompanied by miniaturized, modular technologies, has made asymmetry the main challenge of our time. Where information and modular technology align, no two groups of people will have the same goals.
For instance: In Ukraine and Iran, Russia and the United States have attempted to conquer territory and destroy military assets with the aim of forcing capitulation of the central force by using traditional, centralized conventional forces. But both Ukraine and Iran responded with low cost drone attacks on expensive, fixed assets like oil refineries. Ukraine’s Flamingo drones and Iran’s Shahed drones are cheaper to produce than the fighter jets and air defense missiles that counter them.
And Ukraine and Iran have the same strategic goal: just to continue to exist, while their attackers need to demonstrate dominance. These two outcomes require radically different levels of resources. As a result, for Russia and the United States, attaining victory is like trying to crush an ant colony with a sledgehammer. You might ruin the ant hill but the colony will survive – and build a new ant hill later.
In energy, there’s the growing challenge of the petrostate versus the electrostate. Managing fossil fuel production and distribution is an expensive proposition (e.g. US-Iran war) with centralized systems. The combination of solar, wind, and batteries is cheaper (produce the energy, store it for later) to build and maintain, and it’s at less risk of attack (e.g. oil refineries). Better yet for developing countries, renewable energy doesn’t require paying hard currency to another country, as with fossil fuels. In 2025 Pakistan installed enough solar to replace enough natural gas imports equal to 1.5% of their GDP. That’s money they get to keep for internal investment rather than paying a Persian Gulf prince.
Whereas energy used to be very straightforward: one group produced it and another consumed it, therefore the producers set the terms. Now, modular, renewable power has changed the terms, consumers can control their own means of production, thus creating a growing asymmetry with energy producers.
A similar shift has happened with media. In the old days, the means of production and distribution were expensive, limiting consumer choice. But with each decade, a pillar of media has fallen to the asymmetric systems of production and distribution. Music streaming, podcasts, short-form video, and email newsletters, are all easily produced and distributed media forms. For instance: The most powerful Washington news source is not the New York Times or Washington Post. It’s a combination of Politico, Punchbowl, Breitbart, and dozens of other newsletters and podcasts mixed up together. While 60 Minutes on West 57th might entrance the chattering class, the real trendsetter is Joe Rogan, who operates a barebones studio in Austin. 60 Minutes can never defeat that and is doomed to a slow decline because of it.
Hundreds of journalists have launched newsletters, sustained by superfan subscribers. Some newsletter founders, like Marisa Kabas and Ryan Broderick, or YouTube reporters like Joss Fong and Phil Edwards, have built enough followings that they have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Because they can set up with just a laptop and an internet account, they have the ultimate flexibility and can directly serve their subscribers. Who needs the infrastructure of a newspaper or TV network anymore? In today’s media environment, consumers get almost unlimited choices and can directly support the publications they like.
By deploying modular technology, like YouTube and email newsletters, individual reporters can create their own asymmetrical solutions to building an audience.
In the financial world, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Diamond warned recently that private lending could create a “credit cycle”, big banker parlance for “major crash”. If you haven’t heard, private lending is where groups of investors lend money, much like a bank. Except it’s not regulated, not really tracked, and comes at relatively high interest rates, because the borrowers wouldn’t qualify for lending at a regular commercial bank.
Private lending’s asymmetry to the typical commercial lending system makes private lenders more willing to take higher risk, at more unusual terms, and to groups that normally wouldn’t go to a commercial bank, like cannabis growers, or crypto farms. There’s another, deeper asymmetry in private lending: There’s a difference between the capital providers and the deal makers. The capital lenders – investors who make a percentage back from borrowers – have much less information than the deal makers, who mostly make their money through fees by arranging the lending. But because of their fee structure, the deal makers are incented to make private lending deals, even when the market looks bad, because they need their fees!
Under these circumstances, in a stable, growing economy, private lending is more profitable for everyone than commercial lending. But when you get a “credit cycle”, private capital providers are left out to dry while the deal makers escape to play another day.
Once you start looking for them, asymmetries are everywhere. For instance: Far left and right elements are rising in every Western democracy, because they don’t have to govern or succeed, they just have to point out how the governing center fails. Their asymmetric victory is not to govern for everyone, their victory is merely to point out to their base how wrong the other side is. To stop them, the center needs to find a way to appeal to the center and both sides.
Every time you encounter a situation where the winning solutions for two sides don’t align: That’s an asymmetry.
The solution to these misalignments is to create your own asymmetries. These are now the organizing principle of modern life, and the players built for symmetric systems such as conventional armies, commercial banks, legacy media, typical job seekers, and maybe even political parties, are going to keep losing to distributed challengers until they either adapt or collapse.
Find a way to adapt – or the asymmetry is going to get you.