He was so excited to work with somebody my age that actually teach me how to do stuff. I learned a ton of stuff. It was funny.
One of the first things he said to me, he was like, listen, kid, I've forgotten more about this trade than you will ever know. You don't know what that means until you realize when you're years into it that they're damn right about that. The amount of stuff that you know just by experience in this field, it is a really great thing because there's a lot of people that want to pass their trade on to somebody and they just don't have anybody to do it to.
The reality is that the skilled trades are not going anywhere. Everyone worried about AI. You know who AI is going to wipe out? Middle level managers.
Those are the people that are about to get wiped out by AI. The copy edit people, those people are done. Those people are already all fired.
The document review lawyers, the people that all they did is sit there and scan documents to find strange things in legal language, those people are all fired. The fields that are not going anywhere anytime soon are definitely the skilled trades right now.
If you want to make money and you're young and you actually have the work ethic to show up every day because that's a huge deal, not actually showing up every day, all you have to do is arrive at work daily and you might be able to make it.
That's the only necessary requirement, show up, put in some effort and you'll be okay. Hopefully we're going to get away from this whole idea that we were just living in for, I don't know how long it was, for 30 years or so where we just told everybody that the only way to ever do anything is to just go to college, go get your degree in basket weaving or whatever the hell else it might be because that stuff was just a waste of time, waste of money. The reality is that you can see all those people.