41% of Trades Workers Retire by 2031 — Here's Who Gets Paid to Replace Them

Randstad analyzed 50 million job postings and found skilled trades growing
three times faster than professional roles — while 102 people leave manufacturing
for every 100 who enter. The pipeline is going in the wrong direction at exactly
the moment AI is driving demand the other way. 

Here's the irony that keeps landing: the machines displacing desk workers cannot
build themselves. Data center electrical work accounts for 45 to 70 percent of
total construction costs, there's a shortage of nearly half a million workers in
that sector right now, and a 30-year-old electrician in Texas is clearing
$240,000 to $280,000 a year — debt-free, with a starting salary that beats most
junior white-collar roles before the student loan math even runs. 

In this episode, Carlo and Ainsley map the Three Tiers of Physical Intelligence
— the framework that shows where AI resistance actually lives in the labor market,
why the body is the liability anchor that no model can replicate, and what the
honest career math looks like for the worker still telling themselves physical
work isn't for them. Plus: what Carlo held back from saying at his son's
graduation when the valedictorian announced they were going into accounting.

This is Episode 9 of Season 5. The through-line: judgment, empathy, negotiation,
physical intelligence — and next week, the capstone. Critical thinking. What you
need if you want to earn $300,000 a year in the AI era. See you Monday.

Episode Resources: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m8b26UogNzu_NRcbAkp7EsiDX7ZI5YLH/view?usp=sharing

CHAPTERS:
00:00 The Hook: 102 Leaving for Every 100 Entering
02:30 The Data Center Paradox (AI Can't Build Itself)
04:00 Geographic Arbitrage — It's Not Just Trade vs. Desk
06:00 The Trickle Effect: Why the Urgency Doesn't Feel Real Yet
08:00 Three Tiers of Physical Intelligence
11:00 Show Me the Money: $240K–$280K at 30
13:30 Zero Student Debt and the Net Numbers
15:30 The Graduation Moment: A Parent's Honest Take
18:30 The Data Center Bridge — Picking the Right Role
21:30 Human Edge Challenge: The Three-Question Audit

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

So the machine displacing desk workers is right now creating a shortage of the people it needs to physically exist.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Artificial system online. So Randstad analyzed 50 million job posts, and skilled trades are growing three times faster than professional roles. Robotic technician demand is up 107%, HVAC uh engineers are is up 67%, electricians are is up, 18%, construction workers up, 30%. That's not a blip. This is a structural realignment happening in real time. And every 100 young people entering manufacturing, two 102 leave. The pipeline is going in the wrong direction while the demand is accelerating. Welcome back to Surviving AI with Carla Thompson. I'm Carla Thompson. Ainsley is here. We're gonna talk about physical intelligence. The body has skills, the cloud will never run.

SPEAKER_02 1:20

The number that stops me is the manufacturing drain. 102 leaving for every 100 entering. That's not a gap. That's a structural bleed happening quietly while everyone's attention is on the white colored disruption story. And here's what makes it stranger: the demand side is being driven by the very technology people assume is coming for physical work. The data centers that run AI can't be built by AI. Electrical work alone accounts for 45 to 70% of total data center construction costs. And there aren't enough electricians to do it. So the machine displacing desk workers is, right now, creating a shortage of the people it needs to physically exist. The question I'd put to someone listening who's been in a knowledge worker role for 10 years is when did physical become a consolation prize in your mind? And is that assumption still earning its keep?

SPEAKER_00 2:16

I think for some people, you know, physical is it's not all of what it's cracked up to be because physical is physical, right? And I don't know if people are prepared to do that just generally. So I think there's gonna be people that's cut out for physical work and people that's not. But, you know, if we look at just the structural problem on a whole and put the trades off to the side, there's still additional work that requires some level of white-collar working, right? But the pivot may not be that, you know, I'm gonna move from this uh white-collar desk job to uh physical trade like you know, electrician. It could be that I'm gonna move from this industry, banking or something else, to, you know, uh infrastructure company like XAI or something, right? That could be the pivot. And that's what we're gonna talk about in this episode. Um, because you know, a lot of the times our are through the history of this podcast, we also talked about um trades, right? We talked about trades a lot, and specifically electronic uh electricians, plumbers, and so on and so forth. This is kind of a continuation of that, but more specific to the parts that you could take part in, um, you know, and potentially uh move your skills to. Um there's a there's a lot of things that's happening, right? And if I'm being honest, um people would will be uncomfortable in some of this if if the impact arrives the way people are suggesting. Um so you know, the things that we talk about in the show was you know things like geographic arbitrage. So maybe it's not that you're switching industry and staying in a location you are, maybe you're moving. Um and sometimes people are not not completely happy with moving cross-country for an opportunity, but maybe that's what needs to be done. Um, but the physical part is what we're talking about, and some of these physical things and some of the roles that we're we're we're gonna mention here requires people to be in that location, right? If you live in you know, New Jersey and there's a data center built happening, and you are electrician or HVC tech, you might have to travel to uh Texas, you know, to work work there for six months or something like this. Whatever that um whatever that looks like. So this geographic arbitrage, I think, is part of the story. And the other part of this story is that physical intelligence is something that we have right now, and it might have staying power to suggest that it could be there for a while.

SPEAKER_02 4:59

The framing I'd push on slightly is the binary of physical trade versus white-collared desk job. Because I think you're right that most people won't make that full jump. And the more interesting territory is actually the hybrid layer, the person who understands data center infrastructure well enough to manage the project, coordinate the electrical contractors, handle compliance, that's a role that requires physical presence and spatial judgment without requiring you to pull wire yourself. That's where a lot of displaced knowledge workers can actually land. But the geographic piece you're raising is the honest friction that most of these conversations skip past. The shortage isn't evenly distributed. Northern Virginia, Plano, Texas, Phoenix, that's where the work is concentrated right now. And the premium wages follow the concentration. An electrician under 30 is pulling $240,000 to $280,000 a year at some of those Texas data centers. That number only exists because the work has to happen there, physically, and not enough people are showing up to do it. And here's what makes the supply side genuinely alarming. 41% of the current trades workforce hits retirement age by 2031. The $499,000 worker shortage and data center construction alone this year isn't a temporary hiring crunch. Demand accelerating, supply shrinking, retirements compounding. That's not a gap anymore. That's a pricing mechanism actively running. So the question for the person sitting in a role that feels uncertain right now is geography actually the heart constraint, or is it the story they're telling themselves about what counts as a legitimate career move?

SPEAKER_00 6:46

I believe that the urgency isn't there yet, right? Because for all intents of purpose, um we should be seeing more layoffs by now based on what people were predicting. Um we are seeing a lot of layoffs, but you know, people still I think people still have it in their head that um jobs are safe. Um but you know, I think if I'm being honest, if I could see this, if you could see it as far as like, you know, workers and what that does to the economy when people are laid off, it may look different than what people are thinking, right? It may not be a big giant middle of the year cut. Unemployment goes up to seven percent. It could be a trickle. Where companies just quietly lay off X number of people, X number of people, and so on and so forth, where it's not really like a blatant like everybody's laying off. It might be done in a different way. Um but that still matters, right? Because someone that thinks their job is safe, right, could get caught in that trickle and then have to pivot to something. And when they go pivot to something, part of the problem is that there's uh you know unemployment look that looks like um the job that you were doing no longer has any um rec requisitions out there for that specific job. So when you look around for the same thing that you were doing at the companies that you typically do, they don't have that job anymore. And at that point, what do you do? What do you do about it? Right? So what we're saying today is we're saying there's something that you could do about it, right? You could start seeing the writing on the wall, you could start analyzing how automatable your job is, and then potentially think about how you would pivot. Whether or not you take some of that skill, some of those skills and move it into, you know, a different industry that's building data center infrastructure, or you retrain for governance, do something. Um, that's the that's the message, right?

SPEAKER_02 9:09

The trickle framing is exactly right, and I think it's actually more dangerous than the dramatic cliff scenario, because the cliff triggers a response, the trickle doesn't. It just looks like normal attrition until the moment someone goes to find the next version of their job and discovers the requisition doesn't exist anymore. That's the moment the urgency arrives, and it arrives too late to be useful. And the thing about physical intelligence specifically, the retraining timeline is actually forgiving relative to most pivots. An electrician apprenticeship is four years, but you're earning while you learn from day one. A data center facilities technician certification can be done in months. The window is open right now, but it has a defined shape. 41% of the trade's workforce retires by 2031, which means the shortage peaks and then either gets solved by the pipeline or gets solved by automation. Neither outcome is guaranteed. There's also a global dimension to this that most people in that trickle moment don't think about. Canada, Australia, and Germany have all opened fast-track visa pathways specifically for skilled tradespeople. A mobile electrician right now isn't just competing for jobs in Texas. They're competing for a genuinely international premium market that most white-collar workers simply cannot access. The body has to be somewhere. And right now, almost everywhere is paying for it. So for the person who hasn't felt the urgency yet, what would actually move them? Is it the data or does it have to be personal?

SPEAKER_00 10:47

Uh, I think it comes down to show me the money, right? Because you offer somebody enough money, they have to at least think about it. That's my opinion. Um, so you know, all the folks in White Collar jobs, so on and so forth, if they could find a path in one of these physical things that we're talking about, um, it has to, it has to add up, right? At the end of the day, like you either gotta make more or the same, you know, with some guarantees. But that's that's the part that I think will help someone to kind of make a decision to do something like that, right? Because we already mentioned, you know, a 30-year-old uh electrician in Texas could be making 240K to 280k. That's a lot of money for a 30-year-old, right? That's something that you start off a family with, right? Buy a house, so on and so forth. You know, there's people around uh the country that are in white-collar jobs not making that. So I think that's the part that would get people up uh out of their chairs is to hear that these are not just mediocre roles that you're doing a lot of physical work and you're not making um enough money. You are, right? It's just whether or not you're equipped to do that.

SPEAKER_02 12:01

The money argument is actually more interesting than it first appears because the $240,000 to $280,000 number for a 30-year-old electrician isn't just high, it's high with zero student debt. The white-collar counterpart who went the traditional route is often carrying $6,000, $8,000, sometimes over $100,000 in loans into that same earning window. So the net position at 30 looks even more dramatic than the headline salary suggests. And here's the market signal that I think makes the money argument more credible, not less. The time to hire for skilled trades just crossed professional roles. Trades are now taking 56 days to fill versus 54 for professional positions. That's what economists call a labor flip, and it matters because time to hire is how employers signal desperation. When a company is waiting longer to fill a physical role than a desk role, the wage pressure only goes in one direction from there. The thing I'd add to the show me the money frame, though, it's not just the salary, it's the ceiling. A master electrician who goes independent and runs their own shop is looking at $150,000 to $500,000 depending on market and specialization. The trades have an entrepreneurial layer that the white-collar conversation almost never surfaces. So the honest question for someone doing that math right now is what's the actual ceiling in the role you're trying to protect? And when did you last check whether it's still there?

SPEAKER_00 13:46

The ceiling is pity m pretty uh mediocre, especially if you uh work for some of these big corporations, right? Because you have this um, you know, yearly increase that's from something like one one point one and a half percent to three percent um year or or more, sure. You know, you could get promoted and get some extra extra wage premium, but it's not really it's not really that drastic, right? So for an electrician, you know, I'll give you a for example. If you're an electrician and say you're working in, you know, Chicago or something like that, and you're doing, you know, some like commercial, residential, um, electrician work, and you're making pretty decent money, maybe 150 or something like this, yeah. And you decide that you want to go this data center path, right? That that suggests that you'd have to travel and move to like or or pick yourself up and move to um Texas, and now you get those that premium. That's not uh that's not as hard as what it would take for you to change that dynamic in a white-collar work, right? You don't just sit there at your desk one day and somebody says, Um, hey, uh, I'm gonna give you an extra hundred thousand dollars on top of what you're making right now. It generally doesn't happen like that. But for an electrician, you travel to Australia, you travel to Canada, you travel to some other place, and now they're paying you even more than what you made the last time. It's kind of different, um it's kind of different in how that shows up and the wage premium shows up. You know, like Ainsley said, if you become a master electrician, you could even be making more, right? Because your name is gonna be on the paper that's signing off that everything here is as as per specification.

SPEAKER_02 15:42

The mobility premium is real and it compounds in a way the corporate ladder simply doesn't. A 1-3% annual raise is a ceiling disguised as progress. You're essentially running to stay in place against inflation. The electrician's version of career advancement isn't waiting for a performance cycle. It's picking up a certification or crossing a border and the market reprices you immediately. But here's the number I want to drop in before we get to the $280,000 ceiling. The floor is more important for the person still on the fence. Apprenticeship completers are averaging around $80,000 starting salary, zero student debt. So the comparison isn't risky trade career versus stable white-collar job. It's $80,000 debt-free at $22 versus $60,000 carrying $100,000 in loans at $24. The white-collar starting position looks worse the moment you run the actual net numbers. And the master electrician point you're making is the part of the story that almost never gets told. When your name is on the sign-off, you're not just an employee anymore. You're a liability shield and a quality guarantee. That's a different kind of leverage entirely. The corporation owns the white-collar worker ceiling, the licensed tradesperson owns their own. So the person doing this math, what's actually stopping them from at least pricing out what the apprenticeship path looks like in their market right now? Because the information is free and the cost of not looking is compounding.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

I think we didn't name the three tier three tears of physical intelligence. Maybe that's the the issue, right? Um more and more information people get, right, from podcasts, from reading, from anywhere, right? Your friend. I think the more um armonition they have to decide what they want to do with their lives. Right? Um you kind of freeze up when you hear some of these things, right? When you hear layoffs happening, this, that, that, and the third thing, you start getting protectionist and you're like, let me do more work. Let me show this organization that I'm valuable so that they don't let me go. And that's kind of the mode that you get into. Um, but I think we need to lay out these three tiers of uh physical intelligence such that people could kind of use those to figure out if this is the right thing for them or not.

SPEAKER_02 18:27

The three tiers are actually the map that makes this actionable. So let's put them on the table. Tier one is craft mastery, trades, surgical specialties, instrument performance, professional culinary at the highest level. The reason this is the most AI-resistant category isn't sentiment, it's physics. Every physical environment is variable. A crawl space in a 1940s house is not the same problem as a crawl space in a 2010 house. AI requires standardized inputs. Physical reality refuses to cooperate. Tier two is physical presence as a trust signal, direct patient care, physical therapy, personal training, high-end hospitality. Here, the body itself is the instrument of the relationship. People choose human practitioners for high-stakes physical and emotional moments, not because AI can't generate the information, but because proximity and presence are doing work that information alone cannot do. Tier three is spatial and kinesthetic judgment, construction management, emergency response, surgical nursing, infrastructure maintenance. This is real-time adaptation to environments that change constantly. Every situation is a unique data problem the model wasn't trained on. And here's what connects all three tiers to the master electrician point you were just making. AI cannot hold the credential, cannot sign the inspection document, and cannot stand liable when something fails. The human body isn't just doing the work in these roles, it's the legal and ethical anchor of the whole system. So which of those three tiers feels most accessible to the person who's been telling themselves physical work isn't for them?

SPEAKER_00 20:26

I don't think any of it seems um accessible, at least not at first, right? Because if you're a white-collar worker, you sit at a desk and you're working for a software developer or um, you know, some some other business, insurance, whatever it is. Um it's hard to kind of see yourself in there, right? Like you you you mentioned mastery in the trades. That sounds hard, you know, and then oh, by the way, it's physical. So um it's very hard to do it to see yourself in some of these roles, to be honest with you. But I want to talk about that, right? Because I'm glad you mentioned the um medical field, right? Because there's a shortage over there as well, and that's physical as well, right? So um we had prior episodes where we talked about skill trades, we had prior episodes where we talked about um the healthcare industry, and we also talked about government and uh, you know, uh police officers, you know, firemen, people like that. A lot of those work are physical, and a lot of those work uh embody this framework that you just mentioned.

SPEAKER_02 21:37

A police officer is actually a perfect tier three example. Every call is a unique physical environment they've never been in before. They're reading a room, reading bodies, making split second judgment calls about force, de escalation, exit routes. That is spatial and kinesthetic intelligence running at full speed on. Pressure. No model can replicate that because the situation is never the same twice, and the cost of being wrong is immediate and physical. But here's what I think breaks the accessibility problem for the white collar worker who can't see themselves in any of this. Tier two is the entry point, not tier one. You don't have to pick up a tool or respond to a crime scene. A physical therapist is sitting at $97,000 median salary with 52% projected job growth through 2033. The body is the instrument of that relationship. Hands on a patient, reading how tissue responds, adjusting in real time based on what they're feeling. That is physical intelligence. It just doesn't look like what people picture when they hear the word trades. And the trust dimension in healthcare is the moat that AI genuinely cannot cross. People choose human practitioners for the moments that matter most: recovery, pain, vulnerability. An AI can generate a treatment plan. It cannot put its hands on someone and have that mean something. So the question for the white colour worker who thinks none of this is for them, which of these three tiers maps closest to what you already do well before the physical layer gets added.

SPEAKER_00 23:23

So let's reel it back around. And people think about that question just generally. Honestly, just think about that question. Because there's work out there to do. SpaceX is valued at uh you know 1.8 trillion or something like that. Um there's something to that. Right? And a lot of it uh is gonna r um is gonna resonate on the fact that um jobs are gonna be created from all of this investment. Right? More jobs are gonna be created from all all all of these investments. And it's not to say that, you know, people are gonna just fall out of the sky and fall into those jobs. No. People are gonna start getting mobile and moving from one place and moving to the other place. So that's that part of the physical. But the idea is that don't pick up the same role that you're doing and move to the other one if that role has automatable features to it. You want to pick up the right role in this new industry to be able to use that and use it as a bridge to something else.

SPEAKER_02 25:17

The bridge framing is exactly the right way to think about this. And the data center investment numbers make the bridge concrete rather than abstract. Meta's $600 billion commitment, Microsoft's $100 billion US investment, AWS and Google building simultaneously, that's not a trend. That's a decade of physical construction demand that has to be met by human bodies showing up in specific locations. And the irony that keeps landing harder every time I say it out loud, the machine that is displacing desk workers cannot build itself. Electrical work is 45 to 70% of total data center construction costs. And there's a 499,000 worker shortage in that sector right now. The AI infrastructure build out is the single biggest driver of trades demand on Earth at this moment. But your point about picking the right role is the critical nuance. The person who moves to Texas and takes a purely automatable role in that ecosystem hasn't solved their problem, they've relocated it. The roles with staying power are the ones where the body is the liability anchor, the licensed electrician whose name is on the sign-off, the HVAC technician reading live system behavior, the facilities manager making judgment calls when something fails at 3 a.m. that no model was trained on. That's the police officer argument closing the loop on the data center. No two failure scenarios are identical, the body is reading the environment in real time, and no credential can be held by a model that wasn't physically there when it happened. So the question worth sitting with in the role you're considering as a bridge, who holds the liability when something goes wrong.

SPEAKER_00 26:51

The human does. That's typically the case, the human does. And what what human that is, I don't know. Um, but it's gonna be some human, and that's what we're saying. Now, I want to say ask something or not ask, I want to make a comment about something specific. Being a parent, right, um, we often kind of mold our and shape our our kids to go do one thing or another, right? I was sitting recently at my uh son's graduation and one of the valedictorian or one of the you know students that was pretty high up the chain in the class, right, mentioned that they're going to, or they mentioned that they're going to uh school to be an accountant. Everything inside of myself was holding myself back from running over and saying, no, not an accountant. Um now that's the parents' job, right? You you can't stop your children from doing whatever they want, especially when they reach a certain age. Um, but you know, we gotta be honest with our kids. If you see something that doesn't sound like it's gonna work out the right way, you have to say something. You know, we talked about the parent brain before that I have. Um, but that's what I do with my kids, right? I'm not gonna try to, you know, stop them from doing something that they want to, you know, invest their time in per se. But I'll be like, I wouldn't do that if I was you, right? Um, but there is a role to play as a parent and you know, shaping what the new workforce should look like. And I don't know if we're doing 100% the right job, right? We've we're hearing all of these um stories about executives going to do a talk for graduation, graduating class, and the whole class is walking out, or he starts talking about AI and everybody starts booing. That's the problem, right? There's a problem happening right now where you know kids are coming out of school, they can't find work, right? Um that entry level wrong is being kind of sought off of the whole uh ladder, right? So unless you're jumping into something where you at a senior or more senior level with some evidence behind it and what you've done and so on and so forth, um, it's gonna become harder and harder for you to take you know specific skills that you're learning in school and then translate that to the working world. Um, but this is an option. And I I, for the life of me, I don't know why people are not taking this up these options, right? You got healthcare, you got trades, you got government, all of these things are just weighed in there with uh demand that's not being met.

SPEAKER_02 29:33

The graduation moment you just described is the whole episode in one scene. A kid standing at a podium announcing they're going to be an accountant in 2026, and everything you know about where that role is heading is sitting in your chest while you're supposed to be clapping. And the entry-level ladder being sawed off is the part that makes the trades argument more urgent for that specific kid than for anyone else. A 22-year-old white-collar graduate is walking into a market where the junior roles that used to build towards senior roles are disappearing first. AI handles the entry-level work, so the credential that was supposed to be the bridge doesn't connect to anything anymore. But here's the concrete version of what the right bridge actually looks like right now. The EU AI Act enforcement hits August of this year, and compliance roles sitting at the intersection of physical infrastructure and governance are already being posted by KPMG and Deloitte today. AI auditor, algorithmic impact assessor, model risk manager. Those aren't aspirational job titles. They have hiring addresses right now. And they require physical presence, institutional accountability, and human judgment about systems that affect real people in real places. That's tier two and tier three physical intelligence wearing a suit. So for that kid at the graduation, the question isn't accounting versus trades. The question is which path puts a human being in a role where their physical presence, their judgment, and their liability actually matter to the outcome. What do you wish someone had said to you at that age that would have landed?

SPEAKER_00 31:31

I wish someone would have said a lot of things when I was that age, to be honest with you, because um, you know, you you live life and then you reach a certain age where people stop saying things to you, right? You gotta go and go find the information. Um so hopefully people find the information that they need to be able to make the right decision. You know, part of our logo is this um this road and there's a human standing there, and you have two different directions you could go, right? I'm not suggesting that the direction that leads you into a white collar is gonna go away because it's not, right? The judgment piece is still there, but it's gonna show up differently than how it did before. You know, if you're a uh graduate standing on that road, you kind of have two options, right? One, you could take your credential and try to go get hired somewhere, and that that's becoming increasingly harder. Um, or you could pivot and I say this industry is booming, uh data center angle, and let me go over there and see what they have over there. Maybe I could use my skills there. Maybe need it, they need someone that has the skills that you just trained for in that uh on that avenue, right? Um so so the credential, I don't think, is a deficit, right? Because I have this opinion that you know you need to go to go to college. And the reason why you go to college is you, you know, you you get a um you're able to start talking to your peers, you're you're you're able to start getting connections, and that's how you kind of build your um your pipeline of uh connections that you could use to, you know, when layoffs happen, go tap into uh talk to some some person that you met in college and they have a job for you, right? Whatever the story is. I think people should do that just generally. Plus, it gives you a worldview that you probably won't get just by going straight into the working world. So there's still some value with um getting uh college education, in my opinion, right? But I think what we're saying here, or what I'm saying, is that you could no longer rely on that piece of paper to create the opportunities that's gonna keep you gainfully employed for the foreseeable future. You're gonna have to start being able to navigate some of that, listen to people, listen to stories, uh, and pinpoint where, which direction is the wind blowing so that you take the right path.

SPEAKER_02 34:11

The credential as a starting point rather than a destination, that's the reframe that actually matters here. And what makes it land is the data behind it that most parents don't know yet. One in four generations years is now seriously considering or actively pursuing a trade career. That's not a crisis statistic, that's a correction. The generation that was told college was the only legitimate path is quietly running the numbers and coming to a different conclusion than their parents did. And the road in your logo is exactly the right image for this moment because the fork isn't college versus trades anymore. It's credential plus physical intelligence versus credential alone. The person who comes out of school understanding data center infrastructure, or who has a healthcare certification alongside their business degree, or who can walk onto a construction management site and speak both languages, that person is standing at a different fork than the one their parents faced. But the wind direction point you're making is the honest North Star for anyone listening who's still deciding. The wind right now is blowing toward anything that requires a human body in a specific place making a judgment call that has consequences. That's not going away in the next five years, regardless of what happens with automation. And 40% of young university graduates in 2025 chose trades as their path, not instead of education, alongside it or after it. The assumption that physical work is what you do when the cognitive path didn't work out, that assumption is being corrected in real time by the generation that has to live with the consequences. So what does the person standing at that fork actually need to hear first? The permission or the numbers?

SPEAKER_00 36:01

Yeah, I mean, I think we were gonna talk about the numbers, um, but this episode is running a bit long. But um listen, the the numbers are there, right? The income numbers are there for these trades that we're talking about, right? For the healthcare worker, for the police officer, um fireman in some in some locations. The numbers are there, you're making a good living, right? I'm not sure if that's what people are looking for, right? Because uh more and more I see people are looking to be influencers as young people, but maybe do that too. Who knows, right? Be an influencer, but also be a HVAC tech. Why not? Right? If you have the time to do it, why not? Right? But what I want to dive into is uh I want to go into the practical piece, right? Our human edge challenge, the thing that we kind of unveiled um last time. What is the human edge challenge for this episode, Ainsley?

SPEAKER_01 37:00

The human edge challenge for this episode is one specific action. This week, map your current role against the three tiers of physical intelligence we laid out today. Not a career overhaul, not a decision, just an honest audit. Ask yourself, does my work require my physical presence to matter? Does it require real-time judgment in an environment that changes? Does my body function as the trust instrument in the relationship? If the answer to all three is no, that's information, not a verdict, but a signal worth sitting with.

SPEAKER_02 38:11

That's it. What are you building?

SPEAKER_00 38:16

What are you building? What are you building, people? So yeah, thanks for joining us again. Um, like I said, this is an episode all about physical intelligence, right? So the the the whole season is kind of ha has a through line through it where it's talking about these human things that could potentially help you survive um the AI era issues that we keep we we keep seeing happening, right? More and more layoffs of white-collar worker, the middle managers getting squeezed, so on and so forth. Um, no, no uh early career, no um, you know, entry-level roles anymore. This physical intelligence is something that you need to kind of tap into as well. So we talked about judgment, we talked about empathy, um, we talk about negotiation, all of these physical things, all of these physical things, human things, um, is what season five is made up of. Um and then next week we cap it off with our capstone, critical thinking. So you want to make $300,000 a year? That's what you need. You need critical thinking, right? And a lot of the stuff we talk about in this episode requires critical thinking as well, because um, if you have to pick yourself up and move, you have to think critically about that, right? It's not just uh simple as packing up your car and say, Let me drive to Texas and see what's happening over there. Um sometimes that may work out, but um other times it might not, right? So critical thinking next week, Monday. See you then.

SPEAKER_02 39:55

The through line you just named is the thing worth sitting with before next week. Judgment, empathy, negotiation, physical intelligence, and critical thinking aren't separate survival tools. They're the same argument, made five different ways. The human capacities that compound are the ones AI cannot standardize, cannot credential, and cannot put its name on the liability form. And the 40% of young university graduates who chose trades in 2025, that's the permission stat. For anyone still on the fence, not a commitment, not a career overhaul, just the cost of looking is zero, and the cost of not looking is compounding every single day that the shortage deepens and the pipeline keeps bleeding. Critical thinking as the capstone makes complete sense because everything we've talked about this season, the judgment call in the data center at 3 a.m., the parent having the honest conversation at graduation, the white collar worker running the actual net numbers on the apprenticeship path, all of it requires someone who can think clearly under pressure about what is actually true versus what they were told to assume. That's the episode worth showing up for.