He sent out 3,200 résumés and got zero job offers in the 2008 crash. Now Outdoor Boys’ Luke Nichols is telling grads how he survived

Luke Nichols, better known as the Outdoor Boys You Tuber who captured the hearts of millions of viewers for his outdoor survival videos from the middle-of-nowhere Alaska, knows what it feels like to graduate in a wrecked economy. After all, he graduated from law school during the 2008 market crash. Standing before George Mason University’s law school graduates in May, the 47-year-old attorney opened with the line he’s built a career on: “Survival is not something we just do in the woods.” He said survival is something we each have to do “every single day, whether you’re building a fire, or gutting a moose, or drafting a motion.” Nichols was in his third and final year of law school in 2008 when the U.S. housing market imploded and roughly 16 million homes were foreclosed. He recalled that one in three law students in his cohort never landed a legal job. Three months before graduation, the 35-attorney firm where he was clerking laid him off—and by the time he sat for the bar exam (which officially authorizes attorneys to practice in their respective state), he says he was in “panic mode.” He fired off 3,200 résumés to firms and lawyers across the country. He landed 15 interviews, but walked away with zero offers. That’s pretty reminiscent of how recent graduates are feeling today. Recent research from Goldman Sachs economists shows AI is erasing roughly 16,000 net jobs per month over the past year, and entry-level workers are being hit the hardest. The national unemployment rate, which had sat around 5% when the recession began in late 2007, peaked at 10.2% in October 2009, the highest level since 1983. Today’s overall unemployment rate is about 4%, but time will continue to tell how much impact AI will have on the unemployment rate. Still, Gen Z (like Nichols in 2008) continues to report extreme difficulties finding job openings and little luck landing interviews. Some have even decided to circumvent corporate life altogether, opting ins